The Slasher Cycle Theory

Today some deep thoughts on slasher cinema from that deep thinkin’ pumpkinhead, Jeff Carter, author of Criterion from Crossroad Press and keeper of the Compendium Of Monsters.

Hallowe’en greetings, Ed-Heads.

I like to watch and review an entire horror franchise every October (see previous posts here and here). While every franchise has its ups and downs, nothing could prepare me for the mind shattering downward spiral of the Howling sequels. To spare you that suffering, I’ve pulled back for a wider look at the franchises in general.

In film school we were taught about Christian Metz’s ‘Genre Cycle Theory’. He wrote that each film genre begins in the Experimental Stage, evolves into the Classic Stage, devolves into the Parody Stage and ends in its Deconstruction Stage. With luck, the genre is reborn and the cycle continues.

You can see these rhythms play out across all forms of cinema. Without the masterful deconstruction of the Western genre in Clint Eastwood’s ‘Unforgiven’, we would never have received Paul Hogan’s ‘Lightning Jack’.

In my analysis of the great horror franchises, however, I have discovered strange mutations undreamt of by any stuffy French film critic. I give you Jeff C. Carter’s ‘Slasher Cycle Theory’.

These are more than just common tropes. They are essential rites of passage, and every great horror franchise must eventually pass through some or all of them:

The Original

Hilarity Ensues

3D!!!

Die Monster Die

Missing Monster

Magic!

Spaaaaaaace

Return to Roots

Das Preboot

Hilarity Ensues – while this sounds like Metz’s ‘Parody Stage’, these are not outright parodies like the Wayans brothers’ ‘Scary Movie’ series. This is when humor is injected into the horror, for better or worse.

Examples: Nightmare on Elm Street Part 4, Friday the 13^th Part 6, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Child’s Play 4, Howling 3, Phantasm 2.

This doesn’t even scratch the surface of Howling 3: The Marsupials

3D!!! – For a genre that must constantly innovate, the gimmick of jumping off the screen is irresistible.

Examples: Nightmare on Elm Street Part 6, Friday the 13^th Part 3, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 7.

Get ready to dodge Dream Demons.

Die, Monster, Die – Slashers are notoriously hard to kill, but sometimes a tired franchise needs the promise of a ‘final chapter’ to get its viewers back.

Examples:  Nightmare on Elm Street Part 6, Friday the 13^th Part 4, Halloween H20

Fairly convincing….

Magic! – Sometimes the monsters are human, and sometimes there is a supernatural evil at work. During the Magic! stage, however, we get into some Harry Potter sh*t. I’m talking spells, dream demons and magic swords.

Examples: Nightmare on Elm Street Part 6, Friday the 13^th Part 6, 7, 9, Halloween 5 & 6, Howling 2

When being a werewolf is the least interesting thing about you…

Missing Monster – Probably the strangest mutation is when sequels lack their own main character.

Examples:  Friday the 13^th Part 5, Halloween 3, Hellraiser 8

Doesn’t count.

Spaaaaace – In these movies, no one can hear you scream.

Examples: Jason X (Friday the 13^th Part 10), Hellraiser 4, Leprechaun 4

Houston, we have a problem.

Return to Roots – With luck a franchise will shake off the gimmicks and return to its roots. Unlike the ‘Classic Stage’, which codifies the core elements, this is a hard won perspective about what audiences love about the series. Next to the originals, these are often the only scary movies in the franchise.

Examples: Nightmare on Elm Street Part 7,Halloween 7,Child’s Play 6, Phantasm 5

You can’t keep a Good Guy down.

Das Preboot – The unhallowed graves of infamous monsters are rarely left undisturbed. More often than not they are desecrated, updated and demystified with lousy prequels and reboots.

Examples: Nightmare on Elm Street 9, Friday the 13^th Part 12, Halloween 9, Howling 4, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 5.

How can the ‘Slasher Cycle Theory’ help you? Let the growing pains of our favorite franchises inspire you. The next time you’re feeling stale, try some magic, or take a trip to space. If that doesn’t help you return to your roots, perhaps you can go Back 2 Tha Hood.

Guest Blog Post: Jeff Carter – HELLRANKER

Today I’m giving over the blog to my friend and fellow author Jeff Carter, who if you’ll recall, has been a guest here in the past, previously rating the Friday the 13th series.

This time around, he took a look at the inimitable Hellraiser, it’s fine sequel, Hellraiser 2….and all those other ones. I actually liked the one with the detective, but we’ll see what he says….he has such sights to show you.

In the meantime, I’m off to my Extra Life 24 hour Dungeons and Dragons session for Children’s Hopsital LA. I’ll see you next week, if I make my Con saves.

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I watched the Hellraiser move franchise, so you don’t have to.

Every year I watch a horror movie franchise (my top ten Friday the 13^th list is here).  I’m working my way through them all.  Nightmare on Elm Street.  Halloween.  Chucky.  There were a lot of laughs, a few groans and the occasional scare, but it’s usually a fun time.

There are 9 Hellraiser movies with rumors of a remake in the wind.  I was looking forward to rewatching the first few that had terrified and haunted me, and was curious to see what strange places the franchise went in its many sequels.

It was torturous, but like the Cenobites say, you can’t know pleasure without pain.  While diving back into the first film, I was struck by how joyless the world of Hellraiser is compared to other horror films.  Many slasher films have more victims and grisly torture and dismemberment, but for lack of a better word, they’re fun.  You know, for the kids!  Hellraiser is a different, darker breed, existing in the hellish space between the first Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the torture porn of Hostel and Saw.

The more sequels I watched, the better the original looked.  The grim atmosphere of the first movie is justified by its artistic ambitions.  The sequels are just torturous.

9. Hellraiser 9: Revelations

Ye Gods, this film is terrible.  It was an ultra low budget movie, written and shot in 3 weeks so that Dimension could keep the rights to the franchise.  To quote Clive Barker, the author of the Hellraiser stories and director of the first film, “If they claim it’s from the mind of Clive Barker, it’s a lie. It’s not even from my butt-hole.”

What should have been a saving grace is that it was at least written as a Hellraiser movie, and centered around some core elements: The Puzzle Box, Pin Head, The Cenobites, the bone demon, The revolving pillars of flesh, the resurrection from a bloody mattress, the hooked chains.  Here they feel tired and perfunctory. This is the only film in which Doug Bradley does not portray Pin Head, and it is amazing how sorely he is missed.

8. Hellraiser 6 – Hellseeker

This movie commits the most grievous sin of all: it’s boring.  The three main sets are an office cubicle, a police station, and a warehouse.  Trevor, the mayhem guy from the Allstate commercials, is trying to piece together how his wife came to die in a tragic car crash.

Things go from dull to worse, and then suddenly we’re in continuity city.  His wife was Kirsty, the ‘last girl’ from Hellraiser 1 & 2.  Trevor tried to kill her with the puzzle box, but she turned the tables by selling him out to Pin Head.  It’s way too much too late.

“Switch to Allstate and avoid Mayhem, like me.”

7. Hellraiser 7: Deader

Despite starring the always watchable Kari Wuhrer, this film was a typical low budget shot-in-Romania flick.  Kari is an underground reporter sent to investigate a cult.  Their leader is a necromancer that is raising the dead with his puzzle box in order to find the chosen one that will…help him rule the world?  This movie made no sense and featured precious little Pin Head, because it was in the straight to video run that took pre-existing horror scripts and shoe-horned in the Hellraiser Mythos.

6. Hellraiser 8: Hellworld

This movie was a grave disappointment.  The premise: a diabolical website lures and kills teens.  I thought this would be wonderfully ridiculous.  It was just ridiculous.

The continuity here is off the charts in the weirdest way.  The spoiled thrill seekers that play the Hellraiser on-line game wear Cenobite masks and talk about the ‘Lament Configuration’.  While they manipulate a virtual cube on their screens the website plays sound bites of Pin Head’s voice from earlier films.  Strangest of all, one of the characters wears a T-Shirt with a photo of Pin Head’s face on it.

 

“It’s just a crazy internet game!” (Actual dialogue)

It’s really bizarre and a giant cop out.  This is the Friday the 13^th Part 5 of the series, in that Pin Head is not the killer here.

The website was simply created to lure the spoiled teens to a rave (in eastern Europe, of course) where they could be separated and tortured.  Pin Head only appears briefly because this is another story to which the mythos was later added.  Not even a young Henry Cavill or an old Lance Henrickson could redeem this one.

“Me am Bizarro.”

5. Hellraiser 5 – Inferno

Part 5 was another sequel in name only, about a brilliant but reckless detective on a mind bending case to find the dark crime lord known as ‘The Engineer’.

This is another original script retooled as a Hellraiser story, but the source material and cast elevate this one above the later installments.  The mind games, plot twists and themes tie in quite nicely with the Hellraiser series.  And hey, it’s got James Remar!

“I’ve found a finger print.”

4. Hellraiser 3: Hell on Earth

This movie was bold on many levels.  What starts as a cruel and greedy club owner’s deadly obsession with the puzzle box ends in a showdown between Pin Head and his own soul. First, a victim is wheeled into an emergency room while being torn apart by the puzzle box.  A reporter catches wind of the mystery and becomes a conduit for Pin Head’s soul to lure out and defeat the demonic Cenobite he has become.  Pin Head has a different goal: to open the gates of hell.

He very nearly succeeds, slaughtering hundreds of people in a night club and spilling his terror onto the city streets, murdering police officers and blowing up cars.  It’s totally bananas.  This one is so crazy they made a music video where Lemmy from Motorhead plays poker with Pin Head.

CD the DJ.  Raddest Cenobite ever?

3. Hellraiser 4: Bloodline

Move over Jason X and Leprechaun, it’s time for Hellraiser to go to space.

I don’t know why the director took his name off this one.  It’s clever, it’s interesting and it deepens the mythos.  We go back hundreds of years, to the origins of the puzzle box, created by   the genius toy maker L’Merchant.  A loathsome aristocratic sorcerer (and his apprentice Adam Scott!) uses the cube to open a gate to hell and summon a demon.

In present day, the demon travels to the office building (seen in the last shot of part 3) patterned after the puzzle box.  L’Merchant’s descendant, John Merchant, tries to destroy the cenobites and redeem his family legacy.

Finally, in the distant future, Paul Merchant intends to get it right on a giant space station.  Pin Head and the demon appear, there’s a robot, there’s lasers…it’s pretty sweet.

It’s a disco inferno.

2. Hellraiser 2: Hellbound

This sequel continues right where part 1 left off.  Kirsty, the ‘last girl’ from the previous film is understandably committed to an asylum.  Unfortunately, the brain surgeon in charge of the facility, Dr. Channard, is a bit of a collector.  He has a vast trove of occult objects, including dozens of puzzle boxes and a secret dungeon filled with insane patients.

Using their blood, Channard wants to resurrect Julia. Like her lover before her, Julia died after opening the puzzle box and can now be resurrected with fresh blood.  She seduces the doctor and offers him power in the hell dimension.

Things get worse from there.  Leviathan, the lord of hell, transforms the doctor into a funky new Cenobite with an overly elaborate, fatally flawed design and the dark power of…claymation?

“At least I’m not based on CDs or cigarettes!”

This movie has a Cenobite fight.  Why? I don’t know, but when I was a young horror fan such things were the stuff of dreams.  This is also the start of Kirsty’s negotiations with Pin Head, and his journey into remembering who he was before he first opened the puzzle box and became a pawn of hell.

This movie brings back much of the cast from the first film, including the sleazy mover.  When Doug Bradley was approached for the first Hellraiser, he was given the choice of playing Pin Head or the Sleazy Mover.  Sleazy Mover made it into 2 movies, but I think Doug made the right choice.

1. Hellraiser

This movie holds up.  It’s rich, thematic and dark.  It’s a creepy psycho-sexual drama with a wildly original premise and some of the most jaw dropping character makeup you will ever see.

This is the story about a man returning to his childhood home with his new wife.  We never learn what went so terribly wrong, but the house is filled with shrouded religious objects and unspoken history. His new bride is distant and cold.  She secretly yearns for the forbidden passion she shared with Frank, her husband’s dead, degenerate brother.

In a visceral, creepy scene the man gouges his hand open while moving a mattress up the rickety stairs.  The blood resurrects Frank in an epic birth sequence and sets the stage for the family’s ruination.

“I don’t know why I even bother wearing white anymore.”

In the Clive Barker story, the leader of the Cenobites was simply called ‘priest’ or ‘The Engineer’.  Even though he was simply billed as ‘Lead Cenobite’, the Hellraiser franchise was built with the nails from his pointy head.  Doug Bradley is a commanding presence.  His creepy one liners are the high lights of the next few installments, and he fills the screen with cruel delight.

This movie is a true original.  It is a dark drama, with themes of obsession and transgression, an amour fou taken to the ultimate extreme.  It creates a dark universe with hints of diabolical mechanics and secret rules, bound together with pain and desire.

If you are looking to explore the franchise, enjoy the first four and skip the rest.  If you try to watch all 9, like I did, “your suffering will be legendary even in hell.”

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Jeff C. Carter’s most recent work in print appears in O LITTLE TOWN OF DEATHLEHEM, now available in paperback and Kindle from Amazon.  Get more Halloween stuff at his blog Compendium of Monsters and say hey on Facebook and Goodreads.

DT Moviehouse Review: The Cabin In The Woods

Time once more for my blog feature, DT Moviehouse Reviews, in which I make my way alphabetically through my 200+ DVD/Blu-Ray collection (you can see the list right here) and decide if each one was worth the money. Today, and a perfect fit for the Halloween season, I review Drew Goddard and Josh Whedon’s The Cabin In The Woods.

Directed by Drew Goddard

Screenplay by Drew Goddard and Josh Whedon

Tagline: You think you know the story.

What It’s About:

College students Dana (Kristen Connolly), Holden (Jesse Williams), Marty (Franz Kranz), Jules (Anna Hutchinson), and Curt (Chris Hemsworth) depart for a secluded weekend at a remote forest cabin and ‘accidentally’ summon up an undead clan of pain worshipping murderers who begin to stalk and kill them one at a time. But is all as it seems, or are they being manipulated for some mindbending, sinister purpose by office managers Sitterson (Richard Jenkins) and Hadley (Bradley Whitford)?

Why I Bought It:

After a premature run-in (in a dark room no less) with the head twisting scene in The Exorcist when I was six or seven years old, I actively avoided watching horror movies for about nine years, finally breaking the ‘fast’ with, ironically enough, Exorcist III.

I’m really lucky that Exorcist III was such a great flick, or I never would have backtracked and sought out all the scary movies I’d missed.

And I never would have ‘got’ The Cabin In The Woods.

I never actually realized what a horror hound I had become until I saw this.

This is probably one of the greatest horror movies ever made, period. It’s so enjoyable it almost seems like every single horror movie that has gone before was created specifically so this could come into being.

Make no mistake, to fully appreciate the greatness of this movie you have to have at least a passing familiarity with Hellraiser, The Shining, Dracula, An American Werewolf In London, The Mummy, HP Lovecraft, It, The Ring, Suspiria, Evil Dead, Halloween, Juh On, David Cronenberg, George Romero, Scream, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Troll, Poltergeist, Alien, and Friday The 13^th.

This is really a movie that benefits in a huge way from going in entirely blind. What a hard movie to cut a trailer for! Being kind of jaded about the summer slasher movie genre, the very title The Cabin In The Woods was a turnoff for me. I’m not into the torture porn genre made popular by stuff like Hostel and Saw and assumed this was going to be more of the same. It looked like yet another vanilla cookie cutter teens in peril flick. There would be some topless scenes, some beer drinking and pot smoking, and in the end, the smartest guy (or more likely, girl) would go through hell at the hands or claws of some inbred hillbilly stereotype or a zombie or plague crazy gutmuncher and maybe get away in the end, maybe not.

Then a couple people whose opinion I trusted started sounding off that this was great, but wisely (and I thank them) refused to give details as to what was so great about it.

Just watch it, they said.

So after a long time of not thinking about it, I finally rented it.

Little did I know that Cabin In The Woods would contain just about every clichéd trope in my aforementioned laundry list….and yet still somehow manage to be entirely original. Thrillingly, awesomely original, and more, a hilarious, subversive in-joke directed solely at horror fans.

This is not to say that you have to be a horror junkie with an all-encompassing knowledge of everything the genre has to offer. It’s just that it offers so much more if you’re a nerd.

Surface-wise, the plot alone is entertaining and the tag line says it all. Going into it, you think you know what’s going to happen. The very title evokes a paint by numbers scenario. Early on though, you realize something weird is going on, when the movie opens not with the teens gearing up for their weekend, but a couple of middle-aged salarymen in suits preparing for some big to-do at their white, sterile workplace.

Of course, then we get the obligatory scenes where get to know who’s who and who’s with who, which is the jock, which the brain, which the burnout. Yet there’s still something just a little off. Our football hero has in-depth knowledge of socio-economic theory. Our stoner and his wild conspiracy theories make more and more sense as the movie progresses. The boy’s aren’t slavering pussy hounds – when one discovers a two-way mirror looking into the object of his desire’s room and she starts to undress, we don’t get the voyeuristic topless scene. He knocks on the wall and lets her know what’s going on (does she do the same for him later on?).

As we go deeper down the rabbit hole of Cabin In The Woods, our expectations start unraveling. A bird hits an invisible force field. The office guys are shown to be having some effect on the behavior of the kids. There are tantalizing hints toward some greater purpose being fulfilled. And when the kids start acting like we expect them to, it’s unexpected.

W.T.F! Yeah, Cabin In The Woods is kinda like this.

By the time a character we thought was dead returns, we know this same drama is being enacted all over the world for some strange reason and I doubt anybody who hasn’t seen this movie or read about it beforehand can guess what the heck is happening. Yet it’s not all some fly-by-night-pull-it-out-of-your-ass-make-it-up-as-you-go-along thing. By the time Sigourney Weaver shows up to explain it all, it’s like the last piece of a puzzle is fitting into place and you think to yourself, “Ahhhh that’s perfect.”

It’s a real treat to be surprised by a movie, and it’s even better to be totally delighted by it as a genre fan.

For me, the movie really takes off when they go down into that cellar and find it packed to the gills with thinly disguised items from other movies. The puzzle ‘ball,’ referencing both Hellraiser and perhaps Phantasm. The diary with the incantations right out of Evil Dead. It’s all intercut with that wonderful whiteboard the office workers are all betting over, crammed with achingly great references to threats from across the horror spectrum. When that scene passes and you realize what’s about to happen, you love it, but a small part of you thinks in the back of your head, “Aw man, it would’ve been so great if they’d gone with the BLANK instead.”

And then, maybe twenty or thirty minutes later, they hit the Purge button and it’s Christmas morning, as every monster and beast, every ghost and murderer on that board floods your screen.

Cabin In The Woods that does the impossible. It’s a flick with a one off plot twist so great you can’t possibly expect it to be rewatchable once you know it’s coming. But you do watch it again. And you rewind and pause and slow mo it to death to see all those white board monsters tear their way through the complex. Geez there’s even a 50 foot woman in one of those cages.

One of the most supremely satisfying movies I’ve ever seen.

And, like the complexity of the plot itself, it’s smart. You can still delve a level deeper beyond the monsters and uncover a rich examination of the movie fan himself. There’s a great scene when Hemsworth and Hutchinson are being manipulated via hormone gasses, temperature, and lighting to have sex in the woods, and the team of manipulators are shown hanging on the scene from their viewing room, waiting for Hutchinson to show her breasts and groaning when she initially defers. How many guys have sat together watching a horror movie at home or in a theater and experienced the same audience reaction? It’s a funny scene, and yet the makers bring it back a step when Hadley and Sitterson dismiss the greater portion of the crew and put their full resources toward getting Hutchinson to disrobe, ostensibly for the viewing pleasure of the Old One (is the band of randy office drones a stand in for the moviegoing audience, which is funny, or is it the Old One, which suggests something more unseemly). Their expressions completely change. They’re almost sad to do it. But the Old One must be appeased. The tropes of the ritual must be adhered to.

When Marty says early on that the world needs to crumble, but everybody’s afraid to let it crumble, he speaks of the loss of privacy, the invasion of nebulous government watchers and dropping of sanctions on private life. This foreshadows the situation of the kids in the cabin, but doesn’t it also reflect on the fears of modern life in America?

What is the change Mary is calling for if we apply it to ourselves? Should the Old One rise up to completely tear down the system? Is popular entertainment an opiate used to keep that giant from waking up and breaking out? Maybe this is ham-handed political commentary to some, but then again how many of the general movie going audience came away with this message from something as innocuous seeming as a summer horror movie?

It also cleverly breaks the horror movie cliché down into a thematic, seemingly ancient codification. The athlete, the fool, the whore, the virgin. These are mystical concepts that really do occur throughout the history of human storytelling, and are most clearly represented in the cards of the Waite Tarot. The fool is often considered the stand-in for the questioner in a card divination. In Arthurian literature it’s the fool, often Sir Dagonet (as in Tennyson), Percivale (Perfect Fool) or in some cases (TH White) Merlin, who can look beyond the confines of his own story to comment on the greater meaning. The fool sees the strings, and can follow them to the storyteller. The fool attains the Grail, the greater, hidden knowledge, often to his detriment, as is the case with Marty here.

One wonders what cultural tropes the Old Ones in Japan need to see to keep them sleeping.

A thing I’ve said this in other reviews, but a good movie is entertaining. A great movie ‘moves’ the watcher, either moving their heart to experience some emotion, or moving the mind into a previously unconsidered mode of thought.

I would say The Cabin In The Wood is a great movie.

Best Dialogue/Line:

Marty’s weirdly funny and cryptic (and ultimately prophetic):

Cops will never pull over a man with a huge bong in his car. Why? They fear this man. They know he sees further than they and he will bind them with ancient logics.

Best Scene:

Without a doubt the best scene is the monster Purge I’ve already described above. This flick has a lot of funny moments amid all the horror. Mordecai on speakerphone comes to mind.

But if I had to pick a scene that never fails to make me laugh because it’s totally indicative of the multilevel enjoyment I get out of this movie, is when Hemsworth’s Curt tries to escape the area by jumping the gorge on his motorbike.

After their camper is blocked from escaping through the tunnel by an unexpected explosion which results in a cave-in, Curt devises a plan to jump the gorge and escape on his motorbike, vowing to return with the police, the national guard, the ghost of Steve McQueen the LA Raiders, and ten thousand Roman gladiators to get his friends out, and especially to avenge the horrifying death and post mortem beheading of his girlfriend.

He assures them he can easily make the jump, and cuts a heroic, Thor-like figure for a moment, revving his bike and nodding to them his assurance.

“You can’t hold back,” his friend Holden warns him. He has to achieve maximum velocity to make this leap to freedom.

“I never do,” Curt growls.

He cuts loose, leaps the bike into the air, and it looks like he’s going to make it, until he smashes head on into the invisible honeycomb field enclosing the area. His bike explodes in a fiery ball and we sees his lifeless body tumble down the long length of the shield wall, bouncing as it goes, giving us a glimpse as to how deep it really goes (perhaps it’s there to keep the Old One penned in?).

For the victims in the story, it’s a horrible, hope-smashing moment.

For the guys in the control center, it’s a sigh inducing close call, which if you think of the movie in the terms that they are actually the ones trying to preserve the world and all human life on it, is kind of a time bomb cut the blue wire hero moment for them.

And for me, I just burst out laughing. Is it a guilty laugh? Maybe upon multiple viewings, but the first time, no. I just found the failure of Curt’s heroics unintentionally hilarious, like a somebody calling their shot in a game and then fumbling utterly, or Jack Burton exuberantly shooting in his gun in the air before the big fight in Big Trouble In Little China and then getting knocked out by the falling plaster.

I wonder if this made the Old One chuckle in his bed too?

Next In The Queue: The Call Of Cthulhu

Return Of My Halloween Movie Repertoire

Well the world’s in it’s sear and yellow leaf, the pumpkins are smiling, and tooth decay is on the rise! Must be Halloween, kiddies!

Some say print is dead, but this is the time when the dead walk. Shambling off the shelves come tentacular extraterrestrial monstrosities by HP Lovecraft. A little further from the north are slews of nameless unutterable nightmares courtesy of Stephen King. Maybe Clive Barker’s got his hooks in you, or Graham Masterton. Maybe you’re a Twilight fan (and if you are, my condolences at the untimely passing of your taste – haha). Can I recommend some Richard Matheson, or some old fashioned terror tales by Poe or my personal favorite, Ambrose Bierce?

Yours truly has a couple scary books out. I’m the only ‘Erdelac’ on Amazon right now, so go and take a look.

But enough with the shameless plugging.

If you don’t have the time or inclination to curl up with a book (or have a book curl up with you), every year I update my holiday movie viewing lists, and it’s time once again to resurrect the old Halloween Repertoire, new and improved.

So what am I watching this year? Well I always watch stuff from this list, and am slowly introducing my like-minded daughter to some of the tamer entries. So far we’ve watched Brides of Dracula (her choice), Night of The Demon, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Giving Troll and The Haunted a try tonight.

Also, every year my buddy Jeff Carter hosts an evening of horror themed blacksploitation movies. We kicked off the inaugural year with the classic Blacula, and have moved through it’s sequel, Scream Blacula Scream, Blackenstein, Sugar Hill, and The Thing With Two Heads.

Up this year its Bernie Casey in Dr. Black and Mr. Hyde —

and either JD’s Revenge or The Beast Must Die.

Claire Bloom and Julie Harris face the terror of The Haunting

My favorite ghost stories – The Haunting (original), The Others, The Sixth Sense, Kwaidan, Poltergeist 1 and 2, The Shining, Stir Of Echoes, The Changeling, The Crow, The Screaming Skull, The Orphanage, The Entity, Dark Night Of The Scarecrow, The Ring.

Devils/demons and diabolical witches can be found in – Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Exorcist III, The Sentinel, Angel Heart, Night Of The Demon, The Devil Rides Out, Hellraiser, Black Sabbath, The Craft, The Believers, Cast A Deadly Spell, The Omen 1 and 2, Suspiria, The Skeleton Key, Masque Of The Red Death, Pumpkinhead, Halloween 3: Season Of The Witch, The Evil Dead, Constantine, The Pit And The Pendulum, The Gate, Child’s Play.

Vampires get your blood racing?

'We keep odd hours.' Severn in Near Dark

Let me suggest – Near Dark, The Lost Boys, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Todd Browning’s Dracula, The Hunger, Blacula (yes Blacula – it’s awesome), Kolchak The Night Stalker, Vampire’s Kiss, The Brides Of Dracula.

 

If the homicidally deranged are your bag, you can’t top – The Original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Bad Seed, Audition (Odishon), Psycho (original), Misery, Halloween 1 and 2 (I also liked the remake of 1), Friday The 13th Part III, Silent Rage, Pin, Magic, Frailty, Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer, The Abominable Dr. Phibes, House Of Wax (original), Se7en, Peeping Tom, Silence Of The Lambs, Deep Red.

David Naughton and Griffin Dunne beware the moon.

Werewolves are a sadly under-represented pack of beasties. I like – Wolf, The Wolfman (both Lon Chaney Jr and the remake), Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman, An American Werewolf In London, Ginger Snaps, The Curse Of The Werewolf, I Was A Teenage Werewolf, Silver Bullet, Dog Soldiers and for a switch, Wolfen.

If you like your yucks with yuks, these horror/comedies are a good bet – Shaun Of The Dead, Zombieland, Fright Night Parts 1 and 2, Student Bodies, Saturday The 14th, Dead Alive, Tremors, Gremlins, Ghostbusters, Love At First Bite, Evil Dead 2, The Ghost And Mr. Chicken.

Bela Lugosi as zombie master Murder Legendre in White Zombie

Zombies anyone? I likes ’em slow, bitey, and numerous. – Dawn Of The Dead (original), Night Of The Living Dead, Land Of The Dead, Survival Of The Dead, Zombie, White Zombie, The Serpent And The Rainbow, Sugar Hill.

If you like your terror from beyond the stars – Village Of The Damned (original), Body Snatchers, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (70’s), Alien, Aliens, Phantasm, Predator, Event Horizon, The Thing, The Call Of Cthulhu, Horror Express, Lifeforce, Attack The Block.

It's as good as you've heard it is, bruv.

If, like Chunk, you hate nature, these will get your fur up – The Killer Shrews, Alligator, Pirahna, Night Of The Lepus, Arachnophobia, Kingdom of the Spiders.

Halloween For The Kids – It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!, Monster House, The Halloween Tree, Monster Squad, Mad Monster Party, The Garfield Halloween Special, Disney’s Ichabod And Mr. Toad, Eloise’s Rawther Unusual Halloween, any of the recent Scooby Doo Movies.

Some gems that just don’t fit anywhere else – Creature From The Black Lagoon, Trick R Treat, Christine, Pan’s Labrynth, Creepshow, Nightbreed, Fiend Without A Face, The Fly (both the original and the remake), The Fly II, Carrie, The Other, Trilogy Of Terror, Monkey Shines, Todd Browning’s Freaks, The Descent, The Mummy (Original), The Manitou, 28 Weeks Later, Grimm Prairie Tales, Ravenous.

In the words of my biggest junior high crush, “Unpleasent Dreams!”