October 16 2021, 06:21

Triangle (2009)

Director: Christopher Smith

One of the reasons I do #31DaysofHorror is to catch up on my ever-growing list of films to see in the hope of finding one that blows me away. Triangle is this year’s first such nugget of gold. Jess is a very stressed single mother with an autistic son. She has agreed to meet Viktor, who has asked her to go out on his yacht with some of his friends, but a freak storm capsizes them, and they are rescued by a passing cruise ship. Disturbingly, there are no passengers or crew, and Jess experiences intense déjà vu as they explore the labyrinthine corridors and decks. Then a masked figure starts picking them off.

It’s impossible to write a post like this without spoiling the premise, but then I was switched on to it by a brilliant Projections Podcast episode which talked about it in depth, and knowing what it was didn’t spoil my enjoyment at all. It’s a time loop story, but what’s wonderful about it is the loop is seems to be independent of Jess, who begins to see multiple versions of herself and Viktor’s friends, setting up a gloriously complex plot that still makes total sense, and at the end hits you with a gut punch.

I wrote a full page of notes after watching it, thinking through what it all could mean, which shows how excited I was. It’s about the patterns we find ourselves in, the bad habits we can’t break, especially with the people we love. Jess’s trauma creates a loop in time, a knot she can’t untie herself from, and the cruise ship’s name, Aeolus, aludes to Sisyphus, who was punished by Zeus for twice cheating death and had to push the boulder up the hill for eternity. I spent a good hour trying to work out the point at which she could break the loop, but even at that moment, her propensity for violence doesn’t allow her to behave differently. Hell, indeed. Heartbreaking.

October 15 2021, 06:04

The Crazies (1973)

Director: George A. Romero

It’s hard to know what to make of this period of George A. Romero’s career. He was experimenting, I guess, because how else does an artist follow up a debut like the seminal Night of the Living Dead? He made There’s Always Vanilla, a comedy-drama, then Season of the Witch, a feminist witchcraft film, then this, his fourth film, The Crazies. A military developed virus is accidentally released into the water supply of Evans City, Pennsylvania, and the military attempts to impose martial law to contain its spread. Some citizens immediately display symptoms, most allow themselves to be herded up, and others revolt.

The narrative has two stories in parallel—the military and doctors trying to control the situation, and a small group of locals, including ex-Green Beret David, his pregnant wife Judy, their friend ex-soldier Clank, and a father-daughter couple they meet along the way, Artie and Kathy. In the general hysteria, it is hard to tell who is acting strangely, which is how the virus presents itself, and Clank’s aggressive behaviour could just as easily be PTSD from Vietnam. Romero shows the army as full of ordinary people trying their best to follow orders in awful conditions, and the politicians and analysts in Washington wrestling cynically with ways of both solving the problem and covering it up, including dropping a nuclear bomb.

It’s a decent horror film that lacks subtlety or pizazz, instead moving quickly along a rather plain arc. The final scenes have more emotion in them, and perhaps the coldness of the rest of the film is my problem with it. In too many places it’s a chilly tale of white-suited men in gas masks shooting at people and pushing them around, while officers and scientists shout at each other, but the human drama is decently played, and there is some potent imagery.

October 14 2021, 06:02

My Bloody Valentine (1981)

Director: George Mihalka

My Bloody Valentine is one of those films that is talked about with reverence in horror circles, but until I got back into horror in 2017, I’d never heard of. In Valentine Bluffs, Canada, twenty years previously, the mining town’s annual Valentine's Day dance is marred by an accident that leaves several miners trapped underground for weeks. Only one survives, Harry Warden, but he is driven insane. In the present day, the mayor decides to restart the cancelled tradition of the Valentine's Day dance. At the same time, T.J. returns from California unexpectedly and tries to rekindle his relationship with Sarah, who is now with T.J.’s best friend, Axel. After a string of brutal killings, the sheriff cancels the dance, but the youngsters decide to have a party anyway in the mine’s canteen. T.J. and Axel’s jealous rivalry is overshadowed by the return of Harry Warden, who starts to kill everyone at the party.

It’s a unique film. The young male characters are miners, and it was exciting to see working class characters and locations in a film like this, partially because it reminded me of my steelwork town roots. It’s unashamedly chasing slasher audience money, following previous date-based titles like Black Christmas (1974), Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th (1980) and Prom Night (1980), but it has a delicious charm, because the characters have a raucous authenticity that transcends the occasional acting lapse.

The deaths are incredibly well staged, and the atmosphere once we get down into the mine is perfect, probably because it was filmed underground in a real mine. The killer wears a terrifying miner’s suit and mask that gave me goosebumps. They don’t make them like this anymore.

October 13 2021, 05:57

The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail (1971)

Director: Sergio Martino

The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail involves Lisa Baumer, whose husband is killed in a mid-air plane explosion, and her inheriting from him a million dollars. They had an open marriage and lived in separate countries, and soon people are coming out of the woodwork to extort her out of the money. She leaves London for Greece to sign legal documents, and the insurance company send an investigator, Peter Lynch, to follow her. She takes out the million dollars in cash (!) with the plan to carry it in a bag to Japan, where she is to meet a mysterious other person, but before she can leave, a killer begins to pick off anyone with connections to her dead husband.

Sergio Martino made this film the year before his witchcraft and cults movie, All the Colors of the Dark. I thought it would be a giallo, or at least a proto-slasher, but it is far more a crime-thriller, making it another 31DaysofHorror outlier. Having said that, Martino shoots much of it like a horror film, and his handheld camera is often roving, whether on his actors shoulders or following them up staircases, and he is fantastic at composing shots that leave empty spaces where a threat could be lurking. It’s a fun film.

Many films were made in this period that were set in European countries, like this one, aiming for audiences who were just beginning to travel further on holiday with cheaper airfares. My mum only flew abroad once in her life, in 1969, for a package holiday in Torremolinos. A couple of years ago, my gran was clearing out her house to move to a nursing home, and she asked me to choose one object as a keepsake, and without knowing its history, I took a wooden bull with a bell around its neck from her kitchen wall. It’s on my kitchen wall now, and of course that bull was bought on a cheap holiday with my mother to Torremolinos, which is my tenuous personal connection to the similarly twisting The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail.

October 12 2021, 06:09

Nosferatu (1922)

Director: F.W. Murnau

I wanted to see the original Master, so I put on the oldest unseen film in my collection, Nosferatu. I appreciated the original Dracula and Frankenstein, but they were pretty dry in places. Nosferatu is ten years older again, and while I’d love to be able to say I love these old classics, this did feel like homework.

Hutter, an estate agent in Wisborg, is sent by his boss, Knock, to Transylvania to sell a dilapidated old building to Count Orlok, a new client. Once there, he is bitten by the Count, who is actually a vampire. Orlok sees a photograph of Hutter’s wife, locks Hutter in his room and sets off for Wisborg. After slaughtering the crew of the ship he is travelling on, Orlok sets about drinking the blood of all the citizens of Wisborg. Hutter rushes home, but his wife, Ellen, realises that only she can put a stop to Orlok’s deadly reign.

There are well-known iconic images and scenes in this film, and it’s amazing to see them in their proper place, for example Orlok rising from his coffin and stalking the ship he is travelling on, the shadow of Orlok on the wall of the stairs as he climbs to Ellen’s bedroom, and Orlok’s disintegration when he is caught in the sun. Max Schreck’s Count Orlok creates electricity in every scene he appears, but the crazed acting of the time stripped away all the tension for me, and there are too many long stretches of travelling between locations, whether by foot or carriage. Having said that, the string of coffins being carried along the main street of Wisborg is shocking. The townsfolk think it’s a plague. That’s when it hit me how deadly this creature is: The Master.

October 11 2021, 05:30

Salem’s Lot (1979)

Director: Tobe Hooper

Salem’s Lot has a special place in my heart. It was the first scary book I ever read. The film is the two part miniseries I remember from the eighties stitched together. It smartly does away with the vast array of characters in the novel and concentrates on Ben Mears, the returning writer, who is researching a book about the Marsten House, which has recently been bought by the public-facing Mr Straker and reclusive Mr Barlow. Straker and Barlow have also just bought an antique shop in the town, and the local people are fascinated by the mysterious pair. Of course, Mr Barlow is a vampire, and very quickly he begins to turn the townsfolk into his slave vampires. Ben and his companions have to stop him.

I can’t remember the last three-hour film I watched, but there was enough going on in this one to keep my interest. The script is good. There’s a believable (if slightly cringey) romance between Ben and Susan, a new teacher at his old high school. The vampires look properly dead and are very scary, and the little dramas and jealousies of small town life are believable. I’d forgotten the iconic moments, like the younger boy floating outside his older brother’s window, and the grave digger opening the coffin. It all still works.

It was fun to see how Tobe Hooper’s Marsten House had echoes of his Texas Chain Saw Massacre house, with feathers and dust on the floor, the stuffed animals on the walls, and general air of rot and decay. It was a little upsetting to realise how closely The Master in Jakob’s Wife mirrored Barlow. I mean, come on! I guess it shows the power of Barlow’s screen presence, and ultimately even he is a homage to Nosferatu.

October 10 2021, 06:39

Nightmare Beach (1989)

Director: Umberto Lenzi, Harry Kirkpatrick

It’s the late eighties, and it’s Spring break, somewhere near Miami, Florida. Thousands of young people are in bars and cars all along the seafront, drinking, sunbathing and having sex. A biker gang has a vendetta against local police chief Strycher after he framed their leader, Diablo, who we see die in the electric chair. But within days a mysterious biker with a devil’s trident on the back of his motorcycle starts electrocuting random people, and the Mayor, who is desperate to keep the murders under wraps, begins to wonder if Diablo is back from the dead.

Nightmare Beach shouldn’t work. It’s cheesy and sleazy, the acting is ropey, the dialogue is so-so, and the premise is ridiculous. The Lighthouse, my original pick, was boring me silly, so I flicked through my watchlist and picked Nightmare Beach instead because it seemed like the complete opposite. It was only on my watchlist at all because of its link to director Umberto Lenzi, who made the bonkers-wonderful Nightmare City.

But there is a lot to love in Nightmare Beach. It’s made well, with solid cinematography and an all-out eighties rock-style soundtrack, and the central pairing of Skip and Gail are surprisingly sweet and well played. The redoubtable John Saxon plays the villainous local police chief, and the special effects of the various kills are pretty good. It’s fun! I would have been fifteen when this was made, and even if I was American, I would never have gone on Spring break like these characters do, so there is some nostalgic wish-fulfillment going on in me, for sure. Everyone is so young and beautiful. An unexpectedly solid slasher that made me feel like a teenager again.

October 09 2021, 06:25

A Quiet Place (2018)

Director: John Krasinski

My brain combined The Thing and The War of the Worlds to suggest to me A Quiet Place, one of many recent horror blockbusters I hadn’t seen. A family are trapped in their valley by blind alien creatures with impenetrable armour and incredibly acute hearing. The family have adapted to the new reality in ingenious way, but their youngest son finds a toy in an abandoned shop, and not old enough to understand the danger, turns it on. The noise it makes attracts an alien that kills him. The film skips ahead a year to show the family struggling with loss and guilt, the trauma of their son’s death compounded by the fact they are fighting to survive off the land, the woman is pregnant, and the smallest noise could get them all killed.

The locations are The Thing-like in spirit but transplanted from Antarctica to rural American cornfields—characters walk between buildings on unspoken errands, there are marked paths lit in the darkness, and an unseen enemy lurks all around. The valley their piece of land lies in makes their farm a visual hub for surrounding farms, whose people they almost never see because it is too dangerous. Everyone has retreated into their homes to survive. (This came out in 2018. How little they knew.) Each night the father lights a fire on top of a corn silo, and the other farms respond with their own. This is all the community they have left.

There are plenty of thoughtful details like this, and Krasinski displays a touch of Spielberg in the way he shows the children’s lives, as well as in the adrenaline-inducing set pieces, some of which remind me of the children running from velociraptors in Jurassic Park. The emotional manipulation can feel a little overt, and the jump scares a bit annoying, but it’s a straight story with children in peril and parental sacrifice at its heart. It’s also great to see a deaf character in such a prominent role in a story. A Quiet Place was a surprise. I can see why it made the splash it did when it came out.

October 08 2021, 05:52

The War of the Worlds (1953)

Director: Byron Haskin

I recently watched the Spielberg/Cruise War of the Worlds, which I found surprisingly bleak, so I thought I’d go back to the original 1953 adaptation, The War of the Worlds, to see what that was like. That was also bleak, but softened by the folksy charm of small town 1950s America. It opens with a black and white newsreel montage of both World Wars, then bursts into colour, which I didn’t expect. A meteor comes out of the sky and crashes near the small town of Linda Rosa, where Dr Clayton Forrester is fishing with two scientist friends. The townsfolk are excited, and Forrester gets drawn into investigating the fallen object, while also falling for librarian Sylvia van Buren. More objects arrive, and when alien machines rise out of the burning rock, the army are called in, but they are helpless when the machines attack. Forrester tries to find a weakness in the alien technology, but with the invasion taking place worldwide, a swift, methodical genocide of humankind begins.

It was shocking to see that the more effective scenes in Spielberg’s version were directly lifted from the original, none more obviously than the section where the alien tentacles are investigating the house. This isn’t long after World War 2, but where The Thing From Another World is afraid of communism, this seems to be more about processing the trauma of war. The story lingers in long sections where Forrester moves through a devastated landscape filled with refugees, violent looters and unexpected alien attacks. Every attempt to stop the invasion fails, and humans only survive through perseverance and luck. Ironically in today’s world, it’s the environment that saves them.

October 07 2021, 05:49

The Thing (1982)

Director: John Carpenter

I’m breaking one of my #31DaysofHorror rules with The Thing, because I saw it almost exactly five years ago. It was a key film in getting me into horror movies again after a fifteen year hiatus. The chance to watch it back to back with The Thing From Another World, one of John Carpenter’s favourite films as a child, was too great an opportunity to miss. It’s a different take on the premise of an alien being uncovered in polar ice. In this one, the shape-shifting alien picks off the crew when they are alone, creating exact replicas, so nobody knows who is human and who is not. Suspicion turns to paranoia, and the remaining humans have to make sure the alien doesn’t leave the base and take over the world.

This is one of those films from the eighties that blew my teenage mind. The creature special effects still look spectacular forty years on, and they were created almost entirely by the shockingly young Rob Bottin, who was only twenty years old. The gloopy carnage in 4K HDR made me giggle with shocked joy, but it’s so much more than the special effects. It’s paced beautifully, every scene is tuned to perfection, every character has a personality, and it has one of the most fascinating and entertaining monsters ever put on screen. It shares ideas with the similarly spectacular 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It’s also, pleasingly, a whodunnit like Werewolves Within.

The Thing is John Carpenter’s best work. There are lots of little call backs to The Thing From Another World, from the title reveal, to the video of the Norwegians standing in a circle, the alien diving on fire out of a window into a bank of snow, the block of ice at the Norwegian base, the wooden slats on the corridor floors, and even the fact MacReady and Captain Hendry are both pilots. Carpenter’s version is an absolute classic and one of my favourite films, full stop.