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

Favorite new watches and favorite rewatches of the month?

Curse of the Werewolf was probably my favorite first-time watch.

Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 was probably my favorite rewatch.

Death on the Beach gets an honorable mention for being the most different and interesting new watch.

I feel like I missed the first account of backyard gunmen. How long ago was that?

What the hell?

It was about a year ago. A man came out of my woods (so close that he set off the motion sensor lights on my chicken coop) and was walking around my house with a flashlight and gun. I freaked out and called the police. It took them about 25 minutes to get there. The guy was apparently hunting raccoons (he had a dog with him, which I didn't realize at first), but he was SO CLOSE to my house. It was scary because even if you're hunting, that's just too close to be firing a weapon. Plus I have outside pets. It was not a good time.

These guys apparently had permits and permission from my neighbor to hunt on his property. Clearly I need to go next door and politely request that I get a heads-up text or e-mail when they are going to be hunting at night. A flashlight shining in your house at 9pm is just straight up scary.

EDIT: And I watch a lot of home invasion and "scary guy in woods" movies specifically because it's something I'm anxious about and the movies help me be like, "But at least it's not real!". LOL. (I mean, in a way it wasn't real last night, but tell that to the part of my brain that was like "We're about to get murderedddddddddddddd!")

I only watched 19 horror movies this month, and that's only if I include In a Violent Nature, which I watched right at the end of September. Only one rewatch, which is rare for me.



ranked? why not.

Return of the Living Dead
Ghostwatch
Devil Story
I Saw the TV Glow
Crawling Eye
The Substance
Attack of the 50Ft Woman
Zombie Nightmare
In a Violent Nature
Death on the Beach
Noroi
Houses The October Built
The Beast With 1,000,000 Eyes
Frightmare (1981)
Manster
She Creature
It Came From Outer Space
Attack of the Giant Leeches
Night of the Blood Beast
From Hell It Came


Only the last one was something I'd consider pretty bad, so not a bad track record for a bunch of first time watches.


As you can see, there was probably a good reason why I jettisoned my 'a month of 50's sci fi b movies' pretty quick. The risk reward there was not a ratio I was comfortable accepting for the whole Halloween season.

I also watched one non horror related film, Will and Harper, which was probably one of the best of the month. Surprising since I thought it would be saccharine trash when my gf put it on.

What did you think of these two?

No joke, I fell back in love with this movie (for like the 20th time the other night) before an image came on the screen. The first note or two of Carpenter’s score just kicked me right in my Halloween teeth and I knew I was in for the whole ride. Then the Poe quote.
"Is all we see and all we seem but a dream within a dream?"
Then, is that a split-diopter in the very first shot? And then right into John Houseman telling a Ghost Story (second time this month for me). With the lighting. Pale blue backlighting from over the shoulders with the orange campfire lighting the faces.
For me, a lot of Horror movies are really about feel. This movie has plenty of that. The regular scenes of people doing things and talking can almost seem like an interruption of the vibe. And the town at night... what is that vibe they only seemed to be able to get in the 70s and early 80s? I don’t know what it is about that look that they got on celluloid in the 1970s on certain low-budget genre movies but this is one of them, Messiah Of Evil is one of them. It’s the lighting and camera and the film I guess but man, nothing looks like that. In fact, with the coastal California town besieged by some sort of curse and the kind of design and cinematography they both used, The Fog and Messiah Of Evil could be cousins.
And a lot of it has to do with Dean Cundey, the Director of Photography.


The man had a great eye and a great sense of feel. I mentioned the lighting in this movie earlier and I noticed it many times throughout, not in an invasive way but just appreciation.
He is also responsible for The Witch Who Came From The Sea, which many of you have commented on as a movie with great look and feel (perhaps another cousin of this movie and MoE). And of course, Halloween, Rock 'n Roll High School, Escape From New York, Halloween II, Halloween III (all of which look great), before going on to do Romancing The Stone, the entire Back To The Future franchise, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and Hook.
John Carpenter mentions the strong Val Lewton influence on this movie, and I get it, but it is also worth mentioning the Bava/Italian influence. It's Val Lewton on the streets but every time they get in that Church and also in the great weather-station scene, it turns into an Italian Horror movie. Like absolutely City Of The Living Dead. Which is also very Carpenter when you think about Prince Of Darkness. I wonder if that was the formula.
Well. I love this movie. It gives me everything I need.
Seriously, this is all you need to do, why is this so hard to do? And why did the remake f**k this up so badly? I feel like you could remake this film but you could never quite capture this, especially not if you had to appeal to modern audiences at all. It looks easy, effortless even for this crew. But apparently not.

The Substance is a movie that understands its concept, and how it wants to articulate it, and then executes it as perfectly as possible without quite transcending the form and turning the whole thing into magic. Moore and Qualley are both great, it looks really good with a cinematic language that feels both familiar and unique to it, and it knows how to make an audience squirm. What I think it lacked for me personally though was it lacked any flab, every scene was determined to push the whole thing along in one direction, and it all started to feel a little mechanical for me. I like a little more loose flesh for me to hold onto (like the moment where she starts cooking all the horrid recipes in that cookbook she was given), and I felt all the excess had been trimmed from it. The notion that some people complained that it was unneccessarily long I completely disagree with. It was probably exactly as long as it needed to be to tell that story in an effective way. And I would have liked it to be about another twenty minutes (probably more devoted to those first few weeks of her beginning the treatments)


I saw Death at the Beach early in the month, and so that might as well be a hundred years ago for me. I mostly just remember speedos and people being non-chalantly pushed out of windows which, frankly, is already more than enough for a movie to end up highly rated by me. If you can fill me in on the other 100 minutes I've completely forgotten, I'm all ears.

Interesting, because the length has been the main complaint I've heard thus far. I am looking forward to watching it, as I really loved Revenge.


I mean, speedos and non-chalant window pushing is about 94% of the film. Don't forget his rich mother being perpetually, intentionally clueless about her son being gay and also how often he's around when people have terrible "accidents".

I've been struggling the last year or so to even get through 90 minute movies, and the two and a half hours of The Substance just flew by. I'd actually consider it to be pretty economical story telling, even if it is technically a long movie. Some people just can't handle any movie that is over two hours, especially when it's a horror since, you know, aren't horror films just supposed to be a little bit of fun? No need to give a film's characters any time to develop, or allow us time to become acquainted with the world they live in. Some people just want to get to the goop, to which I can only say, patience my little butterflies. It's coming soon. Listen as it approaches


*squelching footsteps grow near*

For years I always feared longer horror movies, which is odd because other long films like 7 Samurai never bothered me, probably had a bad experience with a longer horror film that I felt went on forever. Finally took films like The Empty Man and the directors cut of Midsommar flying by to remember that any film can be to long or to short, the genre doesn't change that. I mean I've seen so many 1.5 hr horror films that dragged that I should have realized it's the film not the run time that determines if it's to long.

Agreed. I should have been clearer in my original comment: I've heard people saying that the runtime felt longer than the story needed, not that 2+ hours is just too long for a horror film.

That's exactly what I mean.



Obviously for some long movies are always a problem, no matter the genre, but people have a particular issue with horror (as well as comedy) reaching past two hours. Probably because their less than flattering expectations of the genre.



Admittedly, I probably don't like a lot of comedies past that mark either, so I'm criticizing myself here too. I feel even Tati's Playtime (which I think is one of the greatest things in human history) is a bit daunting for me at nearly three hours. But, I also don't consider myself a big fan of comedies. I guess laughing is not my natural state.

Now that I have enough distance from all the bother about it not being a Michael Myers movie and other silliness, I have come to really appreciate this wonderful little Folk-Horror-meets-the-modern-world movie from the Carpenter-Hill Team.
Pretty much everyone who was a part of the previous movies is involved in this in some way or other from Director Tommy Lee Wallace (Editor on Halloween and The Fog), cinematographer Dean Cundey (from Halloween, The Fog, The Thing), Debra Hill producing, Carpenter/Howarth doing the score, Tom Atkins (The Fog) starring, Nancy Loomis (Assault On Precinct 13, Halloween, The Fog) in another small role, even Jamie Lee Curtis... well, her voice anyway.
This is a real family affair. And I personally feel like they were a good family and made this with love. It definitely felt that way to me.
I enjoy the hell out of this movie which involves Halloween, serial-killer-like stalk'n'kills, the wonderful masks...


...Stonehenge, automatons, bugs and snakes, The Festival of Samhain, and The End Of The World. As villainous warlock Conal Cochran puts it, "The best trick ever."
This movie has everything I need for Halloween Night and has actually managed to supplant every other Halloween classic for that spot. I expect this will be my All Hallow's viewing for the rest of my days.

Just wanna give a big, big Thank You to @Takoma11 for joining us this year.
A perfect, absolutely perfect collusion and just the boost that was needed around here.
My hat's off to you.

Thank you so much for inviting me. It's been a lot of fun!!

I still have a few write-ups to post, as I'd like to cover all of the horror that I watched in October.

It's very difficult for a horror movie premise to remain scary and interesting for much longer than 90 minutes. There are exceptions, but successful longer horror movies usually have extremely talented directors, and often take long breaks in action to build up tension again.

I don't know, seems like if they're telling a story, it's not too hard to be on the scale of two or more hours - just like any other movie. I guess if all they're interested in is being scary, it's hard to be just that for more than 90 minutes though.

I'm looking over my stats and it looks like I had about 50 new watches for October.... and nothing really stuck well in my memory of, "highlight," other than the short The Bones (from The Wolf House directors, Cristóbal León, Joaquín Cociña), but that was a 14 minute short. I also want to rewatch Outer Space (apparently the film the woman is trapped in is The Entity of all things) and while there were better made movies I saw for the first time (Candyman remake, Gretel & Hansel, Paperhouse, Rumours), the feature-length, first time watch that's been sticking the most in my memory that I actually watched it, has been FCC's heavily flawed Twixt (or B'Twixt Now and Sunrise). (side disclaimer of also watching Il Demonia, which was good, but overshadowed by rewatching Haxan at the end of September).

I've still got some movies I didn't get to in October that will overlap with my November viewing. Not sure if I'm going to get anything great in that list. I did do a number of rewatches of some prime movies such as The Lighthouse, Nosferatu, Night of the Living Dead, etc, but outside of It Follows, I feel like I watched most of those recently enough that most of those were still fresh in my memory.