Welcome To Our Nightmare III: Terror, Wooley... and TAKOMA!

Horror or any?

__________________

Horror please!

1962: The Premature Burial is fun (and SO foggy!)

The Bloody Vampire (anybody remember the giant bunny-rabbit looking bat I posted pics of in years past?)

But if you haven't seen Carnival of Souls that's probably my #1 rec.

__________________
Captain's Log
My Collection

Also from '62, here's a short version of Pit & the Pendulum that I love.

Now I know I dropped acid.

Wait, remind me, you're doing a Horror movie for each year but going backward from 1964?

If so, I'm thinking Castle Of Blood, Dementia 13, Paranoiac, The Whip And The Body, The Haunted Palace, and obviously Black Sabbath.

Edit: Whoops, I misunderstood, that's all '63 which you have covered.
For '62, maybe my next write-up, Night Creatures (yes, it's coming). Or Terence Fisher's Phantom Of The Opera.
'61, I been meaning to watch Homicidal. I assume you've already seen The Innocents and The Curse Of The Werewolf.
For '60, I think OG Village Of The Damned is tough to beat.
Oh and, before I forget, for '58 it's gotta be Fiend Without A Face.

Ok, some horror and horror-adjacent...

The Tell-Tale Heart (1953)
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)
Them! (1954)
Diabolique (1955)
The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)
Curse of the Demon (1957)
On the Beach (1959)
The Virgin Spring (1960)
Peeping Tom (1960)
The Innocents (1961)
Experiment in Terror (1962)

Truth is I'm pretty sure you've seen 90% of these.

The White Reindeer (1952)
The Bad Seed (1956)
The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959)
Jigoku (1960)
Mill of the Stone Women (1960)
Black Sunday (1960)

__________________

Nice choice!

So I already knew this, but actually doing the research has confirmed it. Man, that mid-40s to mid-50s stretch is threadbare. If you sort by "horror" on Letterboxd there are years with less than 30 movies listed. And if you eliminate the shorts and obscure international ones that are definitely not streaming in the US you're left with a pool of like 15 movies. This is not meant to be discouraging , but it'll be interesting to see what you come up with. I'll give a rec when I think it'll be something you'll enjoy (on some level or another).

I mean, these are your options for 1950.
House of Usher is good, probably on Youtube somewhere. Jinnistan introduced me to that version years ago.

As a rule, I always post the reviews in the order that I see the movies. That's part of the journey. But somehow I actually forgot that the first movie I watched this Season was...


This is an old favorite of mine from when I was a child watching Creature Feature on Sundays where they basically went through the entire Hammer cataglogue, one each Sunday in a double-feature with a kaiju movie or some old Italian or Spanish Horror that was dubbed in English and edited for American television. And when they got through the entire catalogue I think they just started over again. Mostly what I remembered was skeletons riding skeleton-horses in the dark which, when you're like five or six years old, is the greatest thing that you have ever seen. If you're like me. And probably you, too.



This one features Peter Cushing as a "Parson" (or is he) of a small town that may or may not be running a smuggling operation in defiance of the King. Meanwhile, for some reason, there are spooks known only as The Marsh Phantoms stalking the marshes around this small town, seemingly randomly killing the occasional passerby. What diabolical goings-on could possibly be afoot in the quaint little town of Dymchurch and in the eerie Romney Marsh surrounding it? What indeed.
The question that I always consider with this film is, well, "Is this a Horror movie at all?" And the answer, almost certainly, is "No. It is not." Hell, the original, British title is actually just "Captain Clegg", which hardly sends the shivers up one's spine.
However... when you have skeletons riding skeletal horses, creepy scarecrows...



... (who doesn't love a creepy scarecrow?), Peter Cushing, Fall vibes, and Hammer... honestly, who cares? This is fun and it has the October feels for me, even if it is, in fact, not a Horror movie at all. I mean, when the skeletons on skeletal horses chase down a man to his death in the Marsh, it feels enough like one that why the hell not, even if it really is a 90-minute, British episode of Scooby-Doo.
So, as always, I had a lovely October time with Night Creatures and if anyone is looking for something breezy and old-fashioned to watch this month, I give this my full October Blessings.

Nice. The first viewing of that one is always a bit of a letdown when you realize it's more about smugglers and not an actual horror film. But enough of it stuck with me that I bought the Bluray a couple of years ago. I haven't watched that yet but now you've got me in the mood.

So I really liked your review of The Prowler even though we had almost mirror-image reactions to it. And I don't mean that I think you disliked it, you were clear on that, but we are both close enough to the middle yet I ended up exactly as far on the positive side as you did on the negative and even about the exact same things.
My takeaway from your two main negatives was, "Yeah, I felt the same way but what the movie was doing well was working well enough for me to hand-wave those issues and focus on the positives", whereas it seems that they weighed more heavily on you and dragged the positives down some. I didn't care that they didn't get more into the PTSD of soldiers because I guess I had a sense going in that this was "just a slasher" and that all that was just a quick setup. I think if they had gone into the psychology and all that it would have weighed down a fairly lean, mean movie. As for the red-herrings, I thought they were just necessary features of a movie that was obviously still figuring out how the genre works, as you noted.
And that brings me to my last point which really struck me from your review, that I was thinking this exact same thing as I reflected on the movie for a few minutes last night:
"The Prowler features most of the typical tropes of the sub-genre, which is why some might dismiss it as 'just another slasher', but one can give it some leeway considering it's one of the first to try the formula. Another thing that kinda sets it apart is that the characters don't feel inherently "dumb", or at least not as much as the genre would lean to in other films that followed."
I was thinking last night that this is really early. Friday the 13th may have been, by the producer/director's own admission, a direct attempt jump on the Halloween bandwagon, but it really is the movie that sets off the slasher boom (at least as far as all my research on this suggests). It's, like, the tipping point. And The Prowler is one of the first movies to say, "We can do that." I mean, shooting on The Prowler started under five months after F13 opened. So all of these tropes are actually still being felt out and developed at this time between The Prowler and My Bloody Valentine, Terror Train and The Burning and F13 2, Just Before Dawn, Prom Night, etc.
And one thing you mentioned that this movie does well as it feels its way around is that its characters aren't stupid. The ones that have discovered they are in a Horror movie act like people who are trying to solve it, stop it, and survive it. Which is nice. I mean, Pam is a great final girl (reminding me a lot of Ginny from F13 2) and she sure does get the best of The Prowler in the end.
So, good stuff, enjoy having this discussion with you, I think we generally saw the movie the same way and just felt slightly differently about it.

Honestly, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I mean, it's Hammer and you get that vibe. Old English towne, really good interior sets, generalized spookiness even when you know what's going on... and actually this is one of my favorite Peter Cushing characters.

Last year I did a Hammer deep dive and watched a bunch of their pirate/Robin Hood/Medieval stuff and I feel like I'm more primed for Captain Clegg than I was the first couple of times I saw it. Looking forward to it.