Last October marked the happy procession from conceptual daydream to reality of my personally curated month-long horror movie festival, “The 31 DAEs of Halloween”. 31 days, 31 movies, or so the theory goes. A heady mix of old and new, gristle and goo. I had such a blast with the whole thing, even during some particularly trying personal times, that I resolved then and there that the fest should become an annual occurrence. I even marked the occasion by pounding out a bare minimum writeup of notes for all the movies on the program that would also serve as one of my first posts in a year. I was happy to have the record of what I watched for posterity, but that’s really all the 2022 post was good for. I knew I could do better, though I didn’t fully understand what I might be getting myself into by trying. Turns out that writing capsule reviews of 300 words minimum (and often twice that or more) for 31 horror movies on a tight, unrealistic schedule is ambitious work. Either your product or your timeline is bound to suffer. Last year, it was the former. This year, it’s the latter. Knowing is half the battle.
Even though real life has intruded on my obsessions to the degree that I now feel neither remotely able nor comfort-able devoting the amount of time and effort to this website that I used to, I still have a great love of talking about geeky stuff, especially movies. And since I no longer feel quite invested enough in new music to undertake a full year end top 20 cross-genre list like I did for the first several years of DAE, I think something equally grand and ill-advised should take its place. That something ideally will be this writeup of my annual horror film festival. Welcome then to year two, presented in four arguably more digestible but still definitely not bite-sized dispatches instead of the single, 12-13,000-word behemoth I never originally envisioned yet nevertheless found myself writing (and writing, and rewriting) over the course of the last month and a half (and change). If you enjoy it a quarter as much as I did creating it…well, that sounds about right, and that’ll still mean you enjoyed it, which is a nice thought. As ever, I thank you for your kind patronage.
As to whether next year’s recap will somehow split the difference between 2022 and 2023 in either length, quality, or punctuality, there’s no way of knowing. “Work smarter, not harder” has never been a mantra we’ve put much stock in around these parts. I’ll chalk the conspicuous late December timing of these posts up to a putrid attempt to clap back at the Christmas consumer season, which, it seems, spent all of October desperately trying to get me to watch a series of Hallmark movies about high powered ad exec Melissa Joan Hart, stranded in picturesque Ruralton, PA, kissing a strapping, photogenic bumpkin under some cunningly strung mistletoe. No thanks. I’m actually looking forward to knocking out my own set of Christmas perennials now that this marathon is finally, thoroughly, documented. But don’t pretend you can pull a reverse Skellington and sabotage my favorite holiday, Kringle. Besides, this is DAE, where, in spirit at least, every day is Halloween! Please do read on, and rock on. Happy holidays to you/yours.
- All Hallows Eve (2013 – Shudder) – Grinning, blood-spattered, harlequin killing machine Art the Clown may be the belle of the horror ball right now, but, boy, he claims some auspicious beginnings. Credit SFX artist turned director as zookeeper Damien Leone, recognizing his debut film’s lone strength amongst abundant flaws, for never letting All Hallows Eve, a terminally disjointed, often distracted, bargain basement anthology about a babysitter’s appointment viewing with a mysterious snuff tape, stray too far from Art’s weird, primal starpower. Nonsensical death cults, noodle-armed aliens, terrifying velvet paintings – all serve to highlight the greasepaint assassin in absentia, making you take particular note when he’s on screen and, strangely, miss him all the more when he’s gone. The whole sordid affair would probably be lost to posterity if not for how deftly Leone melds the anthology’s superior third chapter with its wraparound story, and the unsettling ferocity and pervasive creepiness, by now hallmarks of Art’s subsequent Terrifier series, with which he and his star deliver their memorable parting shot(s). Say what you want, but Art definitely has staying power. He’ll be back again next Christmas apparently, his trash bag surely stuffed with goodies. There’s far less “there” there in All Hallow’s Eve than in either of its successors, but still enough to recommend for completists or the merely curious, provided they arrive with a sufficient stomach and attention span.
- As Above, So Below (2014 – Prime) – Horror villainy tends to grab all the headlines, and with good reason. Spare a moment, however, in contemplation and abundant praise of one Scarlett Marlowe (the magnetic Perdita Weeks, lately of NBC’s Magnum P.I. reboot), fetching twenty-something university professor, chemist, urban archaeologist, symbologist, and force of nature, fluent in four languages and another two dead ones (plus Krav Maga for good measure). More than any traditional big bad, it is Marlowe’s grit, drive, and resolve, her guilt and ego and dogged refusal to compromise or retreat, that comprise the six-headed hydra engine powering As Above, So Below, in which an intrepid street team’s treasure hunting expedition into the catacombs beneath modern Paris becomes a life and death struggle against elements both natural and supernatural, propelling it ever downward in a desperate and increasingly futile quest to escape. A sort of cross between The Descent and the original Blair Witch Project in its pitched, close quarters intensity, As Above excels throughout in making the absurd feel plausible, whether it’s Scarlett’s otherworldly C.V. or the gauntlet of escalating abnormal and paranormal peril she and her ever-dwindling company must negotiate. This movie, due in no small part to its indefatigable protagonist, was the happiest surprise of my entire October. The shockingly elegant shot where the ending revealed itself left me speechless.
- Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022 – Paramount+) – Somewhere in the overnight dregs of an MTV programming schedule that I refuse to watch on general principle, legendary reality TV show The Real World no doubt lives on under an anonymous assumed name, a bland new coat of paint, and some updated/watered-down modern pretense. Just a bunch of Gen Z slugs as housemates lost in endless self-regard professing profound annoyance on camera with anything that either exists outside of or encroaches upon their social media-fueled bubble. Consider Bodies Bodies Bodies this unnamed show’s extended Halloween special. A strange fusion of April Fools Day and Carpenter’s The Thing, Bodies delivers the dark and stormy night’s murder mystery setting of the former but populates it exclusively with entitled trust fund kids marinating in their own ennui and accusatory paranoia. Which is just about as fun as it sounds, though a useful enough exercise in attempting to wring interest and pathos from a cavalcade of generally unlikeable characters offing one another (sometimes, it seems, for want of anything else more interesting to do). Occasional poignant moments and clever escalations aside – Pete Davidson’s against type performance is definitely worth a look – we the audience sort of want to grab the closest knife and join in the festivities after a while…you know, just to shut them up.
- Cold Hell (2017 – Shudder) – Indispensable streaming horror hub Shudder’s commitment to original and/or exclusive programming is such that it will all too often offer up slight or horror-adjacent content but advertise it in a way that does not properly distinguish the difference between baseline horrorhound expectations and the realities on the ground. Billed as a brutal revenge story, German neo-murder noir Cold Hell never quite measures up to the hype, boasting an intriguing but doggedly unknowable protagonist and a nebulous serial killer whose handiwork she witnesses a little too closely for comfort. Savage individual moments aside, you’re better off as a viewer considering Cold Hell as a character study, a realm in which it has reasonable, if still obtuse, merit. The DNA of a truly exciting film is present here, but it never goes quite far enough, and ends with a climax that veers dangerously close to anti- territory. Don’t expect much going in and maybe you won’t be disappointed.
- Critters (1986 – Max) – As one of the first ever dreaded “PG-13 Horror” titles to gain serious traction in the marketplace, and an inescapable feature of my misspent youth mainlining a steady diet of genre fare off HBO, Critters obviously has much to answer for. What the movie also offers, in the unequivocal second best rampaging horde of oddly loveable 1980s beasties ever, this one having escaped intergalactic jail and crossed the cosmos just to lay siege to an unassuming Iowa farmtown, is an abundance of fun, gently lampooning both upright rural America and the very notion of aliens as inherently superior beings. Created by the Chiodo Brothers on their way to the similarly notable Killer Klowns from Outer Space, the Critters simply ooze personality as well as menace, a gang of hungry, 18” black desperado furballs with red eyes, poison quills, and row upon row of shark’s teeth, who escape trouble by rolling away like turbo-charged tumbleweeds and indiscriminately obliterate town property whenever behind the controls of their spaceship. How some kind of stuffed Critter doll never made its way onto my toy shelf is one of the great mysteries, and, indeed, missed opportunities, of my childhood. Still a blast hanging out with the little guys all these years later.
- Cujo (1983 – Max) – It stands to reason that, in any semi-random list of movies focused on the horror genre’s most recent fifty years, a couple of Stephen King adaptations would wriggle through (for they are Legion). More interesting to me were the two that made the cut this time. On the one hand, you have Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, deliberate, grandiose, and surreal, the early King approximation I still find tricky and that the man himself all but publicly disowned, even spearheading a self-destructing revenge remake miniseries seventeen years later. And then, at diametrically opposed True North, there’s Cujo, which purposely brooks neither distance nor room for interpretation in its spare, unsparing tale of a frantic mother (Dee Wallace, never ever better) and her small child trapped in a sweltering, broken down car by a rabid Saint Bernard. Stark, simple, and visceral, Cujo has garnered on-record praise from its author as perhaps the scariest of his on-screen stories. King definitely has a point, though the movie is far from perfect. The prominent subplots exploring Donna Trenton’s infidelity and speculating just what sort of monster could be lurking in young Tad Trenton’s closet both migrated over from the novel, and occupy no less than half of Cujo’s already lean runtime. But director Lewis Teague’s M.O. is merciless and his camera unblinking as the ruddy beast rams into and eventually through rolled up windows, then caves in the roof of the car, as little Tad’s breathing worsens, his seizures escalate, and Donna races wild-eyed from one bad option to the next against a ticking clock that must fire off like artillery blasts in her mind.
- Dracula (1931 – Prime) – I ask, humbly — How can my grudging modern sensibilities be expected to properly synthesize and rationalize an artifact like Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula? I know how important the damned thing is, I think, how influential, how indelible the lead performance by ancient Hungarian ham Bela Lugosi, transferring his acclaimed stage incarnation to the then-nascent venue of film with what I’m to understand was nary a perceptible difference. It’s definitely stood the test of time…somehow. I know the value of classic cinema in general, I promise. But this viewing, which, as all my turns at this Dracula usually do, started as an innocent attempt at a palate cleanser but quickly grew into something more akin to a contractual obligation, still taxed me. To put it generously, this movie simply has no flow. I checked my watch some dozen times and it’s only 74 minutes long. Browning certainly knows how to set a scene and enjoys playing in the dark – his classic Freaks is a testament to both – and there are some effective elements. Shout-out to Dwight Frye for his comparative star turn as the gibbering Renfield. I suppose I get enjoying this Dracula as some sort of academic exercise. But how can anybody possibly still talk about how scary this movie is with a straight face? Because it freaked them out as a child? Indeed. Do you know what movie I saw entirely too young that still similarly resonates for me? Alien, when I was six. Look it up sometime, won’t you, and ponder the oceans of difference between the two.
- Evil Dead 2 (1987 – Blu-Ray) – Horror smarks (used to) like to gush about just how Joss Whedon’s The Cabin in the Woods (which I viewed as part of last year’s extravaganza and is still a kick) so thoroughly deconstructed the antiquated “Cabin in the Woods” trope, as if that was actually ever a thing. No, when people refer to a “Cabin in the Woods” movie, they’re really talking about one title, Sam Raimi’s groundbreaking, supercharged DIY abattoir The Evil Dead, or, even more likely, about its blood-soaked, utterly batsh*t crazy sequel-cum-unofficial remake, which remains one of a handful of true Eighties horror signposts and an unequivocal joy from start to finish. A justifiably famous Stephen King quote from the original’s one-sheet poster correctly called it, “ferociously original”. Indeed, original on the level that Evil Dead tended to scare off the same sorts of imitators that, say, Friday the 13th begat in droves. In the final analysis, its only plausible competition ended up looking it in the mirror. Armed with better resources and overwhelming moxy, Raimi set out to improve the original’s tale of a lone survivor just barely fighting off the eccentric hordes of hell infesting a backwoods cabin, and succeeded first and foremost by maintaining its relentless nature and intent to scare but dialing back its deadly self-seriousness a single, critical degree. Some of these set pieces, most famously Ash’s tete-a-tete with his own murderous, demon-possessed hand, crash through the walls of propriety directly into Three Stooges territory – more than one of those same smarks termed the resulting genre mashup “splatstick” – but what makes ED2 such a killer ride is the breathless procession of one such sequence right into another. Why’d you have to come back to the cabin, Ash? What, ahem, could’ve possessed you? The events surrounding this excursion into the Tennessee wilderness sometimes make 1981 seem like a cool, refreshing breeze. Sheer brilliance.
- Final Destination 2 (2003 – Blu-Ray) – With its dependence on sneaky ingenuity and lack of a recognizable, convention-worthy mascot, the Final Destination series has never quite been considered at or near the same level as horror’s biggest names despite boasting a more durable, flexible, and arguably more engaging premise than any of them. There’s always been something objectively delightful to me about watching a group of befuddled teenagers survive a catastrophic accident only to find themselves engaged in mandatory hand-to-hand combat with the vengeful, nimble, practically ninja-like specter of death itself out to square the ledger. Released when public interest was still at its peak and before the formula’d had a second to grow stale, Final Destination 2 is probably the best of the lot, anchored by a biblical, boomerang, escalating 20-car open highway pileup that Shudder included in its recent 101 Scariest Movie Moments series, and, as an inciting incident, significantly ups the ante on even the original’s explosive plane crash. Returning from part 1 to provide minimal connective tissue are surly survivor Ali Larter and portentous expository mortician Tony Todd, though their presence is never what you’d call strictly necessary. It’s a kick to watch Final Destination operate at the peak of its powers. The literal Grim Reaper (unpictured) picks the batting order, lays his at times hilariously elaborate Rube Goldberg traps, and the kids either slither out of them or succumb, seemingly two steps behind the curve at every turn. Which direction they go in the moment hardly ever dampens the fun. They’re all living on borrowed time.
darkadaptedeye 