The original Halloween¹ launched a genre, numerous sequels, and a couple of remakes. None match the purity or the quality of the original. Forty years after Mike Myers first stalked onto the screen, we have this sequel, which ignores everything in between. Myers has been incarcerated since ’78 and Laurie Strode (not his sister in this version) has become disturbed herself, an eccentric survivalist whose life has been defined and shaped by that long-ago night. Her estranged daughter has a teenage daughter, and they all live in and around Haddonfield.

Then, in the least-surprising development since the time that couple who didn’t get on fell in love by the end of the Rom-Com, the Shape escapes.

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“Frankly Burt, I think you acted precipitously in cutting up the corpse.”
–Ernie

“Zombie butterflies are, like, the worst.”
–acquaintance’s reaction to a certain scene in this film

This cult film from 1985 turned the zombie craze upside down and inside out, long before it really existed. It also invented (certainly, it mainstreamed) the notion that zombies crave, specifically, human brains.

It’s also frequently hilarious.

They’re back from the grave and they’re ready to party!
–Original tagline

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We’re reviewing neither the horror videogame franchise nor the poorly-received twenty-first films based on it. No, this Alone in the Dark appeared in 1982¹, an initially-overlooked offering in the slasher genre. Its name cast, relative intelligence, and style gradually earned its reputation. If you like horror, it’s worth seeking out, probably the best of the Halloween-derived horrors, prior to A Nightmare on Elm Street, and certainly better than Friday the 13th.

It also features some very odd intertextuality with these movies.

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This 2018 asks its characters to be very, very quiet.

They’re being hunted.

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“Tell me, do you believe in magic?”
— Sharon Tate, giving the creepiest delivery of this line in history.

Hammer Studios turned out a few predecessor films before making The Wicker Man, which has an understanding of its premise the earlier versions do not, and a willingness to push its implications. Hammer was not alone; Filmways Productions and MGM released Eye of the Devil in 1966, an occult thriller which has more than a little in common with The Wicker Man. It’s not the best of the genre, but it gives us David Niven in an atypical role, Donald Pleasance in one of his first horror appearances, and Sharon Tate in her debut.

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If you’re not into the Halloween Reviews, consider this Science-Fact drama, currently playing in first release.

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Our next entry in this year’s countdown of horrors old and new, famous and forgotten, is 2018’s most discussed tale of terror. Films like It and Halloween have something of the funhouse about them. We watch, in part, and often more than once, for the thrills. That may explain why, despite widespread critical acclaim and an eventual strong box office, Hereditary received an initially dismal response from audiences. Hereditary isn’t the funhouse kind of horror movie. Although it has frights, it’s more disturbing and distressing than scary. The opening doesn’t feel like a horror movie. The first act, in fact, subjects the audience to one of the most uncomfortable and traumatizing family dramas in years.

But, love it or hate it, Hereditary is difficult to forget.

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Sony/Columbia have had a hit-and-miss record with superheroes, and they’re receiving both positive and negative responses to Venom, s movie based on the Spider-man comic, but minus the webslinger himself.

The man in the symbiote suit is the protagonist here.

Here’s the place to discuss the movie.

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As no one has heard from her sister in some time and tuition money has stopped flowing, Mary Gibson (Kim Hunter, in her film debut) leaves her private school and heads to New York City. Sister’s landlords open the door to her Greenwich Village apartment.

They see a chair, still upright, with a noose hanging above it.

The Seventh Victim (1943) fared poorly at first, though it made some money in England. Pity, because it now holds a curious place in the history of the horror film. Beautifully shot in shadows and light, it links Film Noir with the horror genre. It presages later occult thrillers, and likely inspired one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most famous scenes¹. It also shares a cinematic universe with the well-remembered (and remade) 1940s horror movie, Cat People.

Our October Countdown of Halloween Horrors past and present continues with the definitive 40s cult horror movie.

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Our October Countdown of Halloween Horrors old and new, famous and forgotten, begins this weekend, with the end of September, and continues, oh, you fans of the fanged and frightening with:

We begin with a fiendish flashback flick that found a cult following, after initially being swallowed by the shadows of The Exorcist.

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