Night of the Living Dead (1968)

directed by George A. Romero
USA
95 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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A special bonus Halloween review.

I can't believe it's taken me so long to finally watch this all the way through, but in my defense, have you ever tried to watch it when you're falling asleep? It's actually an extremely boring movie. I apologize for starting off what's going to become a positive review by saying that the film in question is boring, but it's true, and it doesn't detract from its quality (in my opinion) so I don't mind saying it.

So Night of the Living Dead is obviously the movie that, for most people save for pedants who know a lot about horror prior to the 1960s, introduced the world to zombies (though it doesn't use the term itself). It is 50 years old now, but it really does hold up. It gets called groundbreaking so much that you might expect some of its reputation to be hyperbole, but it's not. Watching this in 1968 must have felt the way it felt to see The Witch in theaters for the first time: like seeing something entirely new that hadn't been done ever before. The genre film world in 1968 seems to have mostly still been dominated by the shadow of Hammer horror and by cheesy crowdpleasers that laid the drama on too heavily for their own good, but Night of the Living Dead eclipsed them all.

The second factor that made it groundbreaking is that it explicitly addresses themes of civil rights that a lot of mainstream media was content to ignore. Black characters were still somewhat hard to come by in otherwise "white" films, especially ones written as competent and capable, the way Duane Jones' character was in this film. The fact that he took in a white woman and worked with her to get her out of the shock of witnessing shambling corpses and eventually to defend the house they holed up in together must have been entirely unexpected to conservative audiences. But George A. Romero gave no quarter to racism in this film, all without even directly addressing it, creating something where the plague of dull-eyed, unfeeling living dead reflected upon the overflowing hatred coming up through the cracks of society at the time.

The best thing about all this is that it is actually scary. It's set entirely in one farmhouse over the course of a night, and even in internal shots with no windows visible you can feel the oppressiveness of the night outside. The black-and-white is haunting. It's just such a genuinely eerie atmosphere, genuinely traumatic and real where most zombie movies overdose on blood and guts too much to feel real. The radio and television broadcasts of the wider world addressing what has quickly become the universal problem of the reanimated dead speak truly of panic and uncertainty. Night of the Living Dead cut right to the chase about topics both social and genre-related, and it set an example that so very many zombie films continue to fail to meet even today.

As Above, So Below (2014)

directed by John Erick Dowdle
USA, France
93 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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A lot of people doing October horror challenges right now seem to have a "no rewatches" rule, but not me. This month has been all about revisiting movies I may have had the wrong opinion of, or that I fell asleep during, and it's leading me to see some very good films in a new light. I know As Above, So Below isn't well-liked, but hear me out: it's fun.

It has all the problems every other adventure movie involving archeology has, I.E.: professors who are implausibly young and gorgeous, people casually mishandling artifacts, people instantly translating dead languages into modern English so accurately that they rhyme, lots of Orientalism, et cetera. You can't really think of As Above, So Below as a movie that's trying to be realistic about academia, archeology, history, or basically much of anything; you have to have the mindset that it's an adventure film, first and foremost. And I think we're lucky that it actually has an interesting concept and plot to fuel its madcap underground Parisian adventures.

I'm aware that nobody likes shaky-cam, but the thing this movie does that I like so much is use the shaky-cam to disguise just enough of certain things that your brain doesn't have enough of an image to latch onto. A lot of the creepier scenes in this film go by so quickly and are so out-of-focus that we only catch an uncanny glimpse that suggests much more. What was wrong with that monk's face? Were those human mouths sticking out of the ground? Are those faces in the wall moving? At times this movie goes too full-frontal, such as with the corny stone demon things, but the things that are kept to the periphery are almost more scary than the things we see head-on.

I am also a fan of the sound design in this because they don't use the typical scare chords and yet there's some noises that are seriously disturbing at times. There's an inscription about the trumpet call that raises the dead acting as a Chekhov's gun at the start of the film, but I think when we see the word "trumpet" we're put in mind of something much different than the sounds that come later. I loved how immersed I got in this, putting myself in the characters' shoes, imagining being impossibly deep underground with this bassy, deafening drone suddenly coming from all sides so loud it rattles your bones. It feels so dramatic, I loved it.

A couple of years ago I probably would have just sided with everybody else in saying this film is overrated and cheesy and not a good horror movie, but now I'm better at disregarding the popular opinion and making my own decision as to if I like a movie or not. I think it's nicer to not hold grudges against movies if you have no personal reason to.

Nothing but the Night (1973)

directed by Peter Sasdy
UK
90 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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I was going to watch this anyway because of the presence(s) of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, as well as its having been directed by the same guy who did The Stone Tape, but I was planning on spending some time talking about how this wasn't a horror movie, until the film itself abruptly proved me wrong. I know this is an old movie, but do try to avoid spoilers beforehand.

So this starts out as a pretty stuffy mystery involving the mysterious deaths of some very wealthy people, and the involvement in said deaths of a little girl who appears traumatized, as well as her mother who everybody hates because of her history as a prostitute and her stint in jail. I felt like the mother was actually the weakest aspect of this, because all she really does is have an absurd hairdo and go around saying things to people with overacted vitriol. It's one of those times when I think the character could have been much improved if they'd gotten an actor who could pull off the role. This actress wasn't convincing as a willful ex-prostitute and her storyline was ultimately meaningless. Fortunately, to make up for it, the girl who plays the traumatized daughter is an excellent child actor, something I rarely come by in 70s movies.

As others have noted, Nothing But the Night is extremely drab for most of its runtime before a sudden and bizarre climax at the end, but it doesn't feel at any point like it's intentionally dallying to throw off viewers. I mean, it does dally, but that's just because that's its style. Even when they begin to introduce the possibility of psychic phenomena it felt like it was going to stick to its dreary old whodunit tone until the very end. I'm going to talk about some spoilers from here on out so please avoid this final paragraph.

Lord Summerisle gets his comeuppance. I'd seen comparisons to The Wicker Man, but I interpreted them to mean that the film was reminiscent of what Wicker Man would have been had it been chopped off at the end before the actual wicker man came in. This was wrong. It does eventually build up into all cultic hell breaking loose on a remote island as psychically mutilated children burn their parents and chant in glee. Seriously, we go from Peter Cushing diligently fiddling around with test tubes and Christopher Lee investigating goings-on with the most upsetting mustache of his career to a child catching on fire and plunging herself off a cliff while screaming "I CURSE YOUR GOD". The Stone Tape got scary, but it never gave the viewer as much whiplash as this. I even enjoyed the dull parts, probably because I was expecting them to be that way, but the way it immediately ramped up into terror was the cherry on top.

Carved: A Slit-Mouthed Woman (2007)

directed by Kôji Shiraishi
Japan
90 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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As frequently happens, this is a movie that I tried to watch several years back but fell asleep during, so it's like I was watching it for the first time this time around. I was kind of surprised upon re-visiting it because I actually feel like this is one of Kôji Shiraishi's better movies, and I thought I had watched all his good ones already. The man still can't end a film to save his life, though.

So for the uninitiated, Kuchisake-onna is an urban legend in Japan wherein a woman with a deep gash in her face will come up to you and ask if you think she's pretty; if you agree, she'll use giant scissors to make you look like her. If you disagree, she'll still just kill you. If you say "eh you're average" she'll get all flummoxed and let you alone. A lot of urban legends in Japan are like this- creatures that accost you with a trick question, but if you know the answer, you can get them to leave you on your merry way. Watching this movie, I was struck by how deeply the standard of being polite and using the right greetings and honorifics runs, and I feel like that might have something to do with the prevalence of this kind of riddle-based urban legend: it's sourced from the fear of saying/doing the wrong thing.

This movie looks at the urban legend from different perspectives and involves the characters' personal lives in the way they see the legend, which I think is what any good movie centered around folklore/legends/etc. should do. One man is tormented by hearing the slit-mouthed woman's taunts in his head, a little girl seems to almost think being taken by her would be preferable to staying with her abusive mother, et cetera. However after a while the film kind of devolves into just child abuse, child abuse, child abuse- and it doesn't get any of the nuances right or seem to think much deeper than just "mom hits kid, kid cries" which makes its portrayal of abuse feel rushed and unsympathetic at worst, and poorly thought-out at best. The theme of reconciliation is less about "I did this horrible thing to you and I'm sorry" than it is about "even if families are abusive they still need to stick together because that is the way families should be", even if it doesn't explicitly say that on the surface.

Carved also adds an interesting element to the urban legend's story in which the slit-mouthed woman becomes a kind of "curse" that can jump from person to person, as opposed to a single figure who stays the same throughout all encounters with her. Multiple women become the slit-mouthed woman. This is also a really neat way of depicting an urban legend because it shows it as a kind of archetype, which legends frequently are- less a being and more an idea of a being, surviving that way throughout the years because the concept of it can never die without a physical body.

Errementari: The Blacksmith and the Devil (2017)

directed by Paul Urkijo Alijo
Spain/France
93 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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I'd been anticipating this for a while now, and it was a big surprise when it got put up on Netflix. It's based on a Basque folktale, which is really neat because the world could use more movies in Basque. I hear the English dub is terrible so do watch it with subtitles if you are not a Basque speaker.

This movie had a totally different atmosphere than I expected. The most striking thing about it is that the titular devil is literally a devil, as in red skin, a tail, horns, and a pitchfork, and this is played utterly straight. If you're like me and you expected this film to be dead serious, the appearance of a literal archetypical cartoon devil can be almost comical, but in the end I loved it. And it makes sense too- at the point in time in which this movie is set, people would be expecting the devil to look like that, and so of course demons would appear in the form people fear the most. Today they might disguise themselves as any number of things, but in the mid-1800s the standard image of a horned devil was enough to frighten.

The fact that this doesn't take itself 100% seriously is really great, because I believe it feels more like folklore that way, since folktales are usually a bit nonsensical. It isn't a comedy by any means, and don't get me wrong, it's still got a lot of brutality and darkness in it, but it also portrays devils as not immune to humanity: this is a creature that goes nuts if you spill chickpeas around him, because he's compelled to count them all; a creature who can be annoyed by being poked and prodded by a small girl. This isn't a devil who's above it all, suave, dangerous; he's a flesh-and-blood dude who happens to have the job of being super evil, and gets really tired of dealing with humans after a while.

I don't know if Alex de la Iglesia had much to do with this outside of "presenting" it, but it actually does feel a lot like a film of his, and that was something I personally wasn't fond of. I like Alex de la Iglesia a lot, he's got great films (mostly), but I thought that sometimes the violence in Errementari felt out of place, although that thought could just be a holdover from me thinking this was going to be a moody slow-burn. Basically it's best to go into this with little to no expectations, and familiarity with the original folktale might help as well. Uma Bracaglia as Usue is absolutely great and doesn't feel like she's trapped within the "plucky orphan" trope at all.

Apostle (2018)

directed by Gareth Evans
UK, USA
130 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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Netflix put this up at precisely the right time, because although it's been October for two weeks now, the weather where I live has only just begun to get really chilly, and for me personally, that's what signals the start of Halloween.

My first impression of the film was that Dan Stevens is really good. My second impression was that Dan Stevens is really good. He blends perfectly into this period piece from the very early 1900s. The cinematography and setup of the whole film is perfect- it looks unshowy, hand-cobbled; realistically dirty and full of smoke and soot. 1905 doesn't seem like that long ago until you realize that it actually was. The music is also a huge part of why I was so pulled in by the atmosphere. That tune that plays in the tavern towards the beginning was a straight up "put a fire in your blood" type thing and maybe it was a little more modern than the setting required but it sounded amazing.

So many small atrocities happen throughout the course of Apostle that I was expecting them all to eventually build to some singular, horrific finale that would outdo everything, but this isn't necessarily the case. The bad things keep coming with no significant increase in ferocity, except towards the end. Some scenes are more extensive and traumatic than others, but practically every moment is an enforcement of the wrongness of the environment. As a cult film it doesn't even make a particular effort to put on the whole "This is a utopian paradise where we definitely don't kill people" thing most cult leaders try to do, it starts right out with burning books, and really, no good has ever come of an organization asking people to burn their (regular, non-offensive) books. Of note is that the name "Eris" is also the name of an ancient Greek goddess of strife and discord. Erisden, Eris' Den.

The only thing I wasn't fond of was the insertion of a romantic subplot about forbidden love between two young people within the cult, and even this I'm reluctant to criticize because I did think it was done well. It's just the kind of thing I wasn't expecting to see in a movie this brutal. The relationship itself ends in brutality, which made me feel like the only reason it was there in the first place was so it could all go horribly wrong- I didn't see another ending to it right from when it was introduced. Also, I didn't like that this used typical ~*exotic*~ Orientalism in the protag's backstory- you can tell a lot about a film by who it chooses to subtitle, and in this case the few Chinese lines are not deemed significant enough for us to know what they mean beyond that they're supposed to be menacing.

I've been so used to watching hour-and-a-half films that something this long took me a bit to adjust to. It's like one long exhale, it gives itself time to develop, unfurl, and reveal more and more terrible things instead of rushing to get it all out in a structured beginning-middle-end (though it does have that too). Some of the CGI felt out-of-place and I think at times it could have benefited from a "less is more" philosophy, but on the whole, this is one of the top horror movies I've seen this year.

Robin Redbreast (1970)

directed by James MacTaggart
UK
76 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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The weather outside was dark and stormy thanks to some runoff from Tropical Storm Michael, and it was the perfect atmosphere for watching Robin Redbreast, which I've wanted to see for such a long time. Its black-and-white cinematography makes it look like it was shot around 1932, but surprisingly its politics and stance on women's rights is more modern than a whole lot of movies coming out even today.

I made a bit of a mistake in thinking this was going to be like The Wicker Man, because it has an entirely different vibe, although the two films have many similarities. Wicker Man is joyful in its pagan celebrations, dancing around maypoles and flaunting it in the face of staunch modernity; Robin Redbreast is almost the opposite. The villagers are depicted as conservative in terms of sticking to an old, unchanging way of life; the outsider in their midst is the non-religious, free-ranging, unmarried and (eventually) pregnant woman. They don't make a point of begrudging her for her ways, but neither do they openly accept her among their number. It's a kind of quiet ostracization that fits the gloomy atmosphere.

I absolutely love old lo-fi British horror like this because it feels like they had so little to work with in terms of effects, but did so much more with what they did have. I think context plays a part, too- this was Play For Today, which as I understand means it was broadcast on public television, and I don't know much about the standards for TV content in Britain at the time, but I would think that you couldn't exactly make Texas Chainsaw Massacre and show it at 2 in the afternoon. Hence these slow-burn, psychological folk horrors, with focus on hidden occult truths underneath the landscape of the countryside instead of on explicit bodily harm.

Like I said in the beginning, this is more progressive about women's autonomy than scores and scores of modern films. To start off with, the main character is a sort-of middle-aged woman who's depicted as actually having sexual desires simply because she wants to- the idea of a woman seeking out sex in a way that's personal and not intended for the consumption of men is something that a lot of media won't touch. Secondly, she openly uses birth control, and when she accidentally gets pregnant she doesn't flinch about the option to get an abortion, and even though she does eventually decide to keep the baby, she's militant about the fact that it's her right to terminate the pregnancy if she wanted to, and the man has no say in it.

So don't come into this looking for something dramatic and constantly changing, it's a slow tide of oppression building up to a mostly offscreen horror. I guess it probably did inspire The Wicker Man but the two are very different in tone and in moral standing. I do feel like this might have been gorgeous if it were in color but the black-and-white gives it a Vibe™.

Mr. Vampire (1985)

directed by Ricky Lau
Hong Kong
96 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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This is probably the most famous example of the Chinese hopping vampire (also known as jiangshi and in Cantonese goeng-si) on film, which is basically where a body comes back to life, due to poor burial practices or a curse or just whatever, as a hopping corpse with its arms out, zombie-like, dressed in traditional garb with a paper scroll stuck to its face. The scroll is supposed to immobilize it, and the hopping part is probably intended to emulate rigor mortis. The hopping vampire is instantly recognizable and there's media depicting it all across Asia; I think there's even some kids' movies and maybe like a Digimon or something based off of it.

So, it's popular, but is it good? Yes! I can't speak for the plethora of sequels this movie spawned, but this one, at least, is really fun the way Hong Kong horror comedies always are. As with the majority of them, most of its humor is slapstick and comes from characters doing silly things and throwing around some goofy over-the-top martial arts at each other, but there's also jokes with a kind of universal humor that work no matter the time and place. This could have done without the misogyny (incl. transmisogyny unfortunately) though.

Obviously the focus of the film is the jiangshi, but there's no shortage of non-jiangshi reanimated corpses in this. Depicted as equally fearsome and a little more immediately threatening due to their speed, some of the bodies come back to life as aggressive and extremely mobile creatures more like stereotypical Western zombies than anything else. I don't know what the difference was between these guys and jiangshi, or why some bodies turned into one and some turned into the other, but they both share the factor of not being able to get you if you hold your breath (and probably therefore hide your qi- the stuff they feed on) which results in some of the characters using a long bamboo pipe contraption to redirect their breath to another place in the room, which was pretty clever.

A lot of the time when I watch Hong Kong genre comedies from the 80s and early 90s like this one, I have trouble keeping up with the plot because there's so much happening all at once, but that wasn't an issue with Mr. Vampire. It still has the chaotic energy of its cinematic peers, but I could grasp what was going on- everything didn't have the cobbled-together feeling that I struggle with sometimes. You gotta have sticky rice to thwart the hopping vampire bite, both cooked and uncooked. But it has to be sticky rice, regular rice won't work. So be careful who you get your sticky rice from because some people have no idea of the urgency of your request for like 80 pounds of rice and will simply give you regular rice because it's cheaper for them. I think people who dislike this movie are people who just hate fun.

Suspiria (1977)

directed by Dario Argento
Italy
98 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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I first tried to watch this several years ago, before I started regularly watching and reviewing horror movies, and my immediate impression was just "this is bad". I got through about fifteen minutes and then fell asleep. I don't know why it's taken me this long to get around to watching it through, but to no one's surprise, my opinion on it has done a complete 180 to the point where I think this is one of the best movies I've ever seen. It's just bonkers for so many reasons.

Suspiria is nothing if not excessive. Saying that it goes all-out is doing it an injustice; it goes beyond all-out and into the territory of ridiculousness. Nobody ever told Dario Argento to chill out a single time in his life. There's essentially no plot-relevant reason why anything in this movie has to look the way it does: it's all colored, lit, shot, and constructed purely according to what looks good, and now that I can appreciate that fact, I admire it more than anything. There's no reason for one side of the curtains to be lit blue and the other side lit red, or for neon green lighting to fall onto the back of one girl's head without illuminating the girl she's talking to, or any number of other instances where neon overtakes the frame, other than "it looks cool and we can do it". Sheer aesthetic insanity start to finish.

I guess the reason why I thought this was bad at first is because it can be jarring if you're not prepared for how off-the-rails the dialogue and acting is, and for giallo's infamous problem with horrendous dubbing. Some of the script is The Room-level bad. "I once read that names, which begin with the letter S, are the names of.... ssssNAKES!" isn't even the worst of it. Bless Jessica Harper for delivering these awful lines with a modicum of seriousness, because nobody else did.

I don't really think Suspiria goes in for symbolism- it's such a purely aesthetic movie that nothing exists much further than the surface. But if you look at it the right way, it can be an interesting depiction of the misogyny behind why men make up stories of witches. I don't think the film is aware it's depicting this, and in fact it seems itself to be contributing to the evil witch trope, but nonetheless, the thing intended to be frightening is the suggestion of the witch- literally the shadows on the wall, the conception of a feminine evil operating clandestinely beneath the noses of men. I would argue that the majority of men are not physically intimidated by women, having been conditioned to confidence in their own power over them, and so the only way men can fear women is if they conceive of them as endowed with magical power and the ability to convert innocent girls to their coven of evil.

It will be interesting to see how the remake addresses these issues of misogyny given how ham-fisted the original is. So much of it is so clearly intended for nothing but eye candy. I laughed out loud at a scene where a nameless girl bounds downstairs in a tight shirt with her robe open and then immediately closes her robe at the bottom of the stairs, because it's incredibly obvious we were only meant to look at her chest. It's hard to express in words why this is such a compelling movie, because to describe it straight-on sounds too absurd to be good. But believe the hype: it is amazing. The soundtrack is something you feel in your blood. It is a full sensory experience for 98 minutes that feels like it lasts for several hours. There's giallo and then there's Suspiria.

Kazuo Umezu's Horror Theater: Snake Girl (2005)

directed by Noboru Iguchi
Japan
53 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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Don't ask why I gave this such a high rating because even I am not 100% sure. The source material being Kazuo Umezu helps, because he's good to begin with, but I definitely loved this movie for what it was regardless of where the story came from. Snake girls seem to be a semi-popular motif in Japanese horror, and I'd place this one under the category of "folk horror" due to that and its setting in a remote mountain village. In my opinion this all makes it good October viewing.

It seems like most of these Kazuo Umezu's Horror Theater movies, and a lot of J-horror from the mid-2000s in general, made use of an extremely lo-fi, shot-on-video aesthetic that somehow enhanced them more than intricate cinematography and/or lighting, camera angles, etc. could ever have done. There's only minimal CGI, and even less set dressing, so you get the feeling that this is kind of just how Japan looks in its natural state- or I guess how it looked, seeing as most of these films were made ~15 years ago. But having horror set in such an intensely mundane atmosphere, with seemingly little done to prepare the environment for shooting a film, really makes for a unique look and feel that not many movies have.

Surprisingly, for such a relatively short movie, Snake Girl gets into the personal life of its protagonist enough that I genuinely felt for her. She has an affinity for posting nasty messages on an online message board, but the way it's presented is that even she doesn't really know why she's doing these things- she's a nice person in real life, but is having trouble figuring out her feelings as she gets older, and turns to this message board as an outlet. The film concludes with the main character recognizing her anger and realizing that it wasn't a good thing, and that it wasn't part of the person she wanted to be. I can think of tons and tons of movies and television shows that don't write their adult protagonists with this much maturity, and this is a 50-minute-long horror movie starring a preteen girl who encounters a village full of snake people.

So it's half fun folk horror with some... interesting-looking monster makeup, half a story about a girl growing up. The main actress does a great job with all of this. Also I don't support anti-snake propaganda, but I enjoyed this anyway.