31 Days of Horror Movies 2019: A Summary
For Halloween this year I decided to do something different: in addition to watching as many horror movies and TV shows as possible, I wrote film-appreciation posts for the full thirty-one days. For the most part the films were spontaneously chosen the day of the posts, so the list meanders, but in case you’re a fan of meandering, I’ll share the list here (in the same order as my Instagram posts). I’ve also linked the movies where possible.
October 1: The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sánchez, 1999)
The film itself is frightening enough, but its innovative marketing campaign is where it truly shines. Back in 1999 when BWP was being marketed, I was a teenager with limited access to the Internet. View post on Instagram.
October 2: Madman (Joe Giannone, 1981)
So what makes this one special? To be honest, not much. You only need to watch the first 6.5 minutes to experience my favourite part of the story, which "all start[s] during a campfire at North Sea Cottages, a special retreat for gifted children..." View post on Instagram.
October 3: The Possession (Ole Bornedal, 2012)
I'd like to say that the film draws on Jewish folklore surrounding the "dybbuk box," because that's what it'd have us believe, but in fact, it's based on an eBay auction from 2003, in which professional writer Kevin Mannis concocted a spooky story in order to sell an old "wine cabinet." View post on Instagram.
October 4: Ju-on: The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu, 2002)
Ju-on: The Grudge is one of my all-time favourite horror films, but I've not met many other people who were as traumatized by it as I was (and still am). I attribute part of my intense response to the film to the context in which I viewed it. View post on Instagram.
October 5: Rabbit’s Moon (Kenneth Anger, 1972/79)
You can find multiple versions of the short film on YouTube. My favourite is the 1979 edit, which is sped up and features “It Came in the Night,” but it’s interesting to compare this with the 1972 release, which is slower and feels softer, with a soundtrack that reflects the film’s ’50s roots. View post on Instagram.
October 6: Begotten (E. Elias Merhige, 1990)
It’s a bit as if David Lynch called up 1990s Trent Reznor and said, “You know what Trent? Eraserhead is too mainstream and heartwarming. Let’s create something that will really make people feel weird.” View post on Instagram.
October 7: Calvaire (Fabrice Du Welz, 2004)
I’ve not seen many Belgian horror films, but I’ve seen enough to feel confident saying that Belgian directors seem to do bizarre particularly well. View post on Instagram.
October 8: Martyrs (Pascal Laugier, 2008)
Put any mangled body on the ground and make it shimmy, twitch and crawl, and I'm sold. Martyrs does this, but also a lot more. View post on Instagram.
October 9: Daughters of Darkness (Harry Kümel, 1971)
If you're in the mood for melodramatic acting, almost offensive levels of beauty, and even more offensive levels of sexiness, all to one of the best scores in horror movie history, this is the film for you. View post on Instagram.
October 10: Ginger Snaps (John Fawcett, 2000)
When Ginger Fitzgerald starts growing hair in weird places and having strange insatiable urges, she’s left to sort out whether the changes she’s undergoing are “just” puberty, or whether she’s becoming a werewolf. ... As body horror, as Canadian horror, as a monster film, and as a coming-of-age high school movie, Ginger Snaps presents a clever take that’s well worth a watch. View post on Instagram.
October 11: Vampire’s Kiss (Robert Bierman, 1988)
October 12: Scanners (David Cronenberg, 1981)
The story my mom tells (which is how I remember it too, albeit from a different perspective) is that she heard uproarious laughter and ewwws and ohhhhs coming from the basement, so she snuck down and looked in on us. We were rewinding and replaying the Scanners head-explosion scene in slow motion, over and over again. View post on Instagram.
October 13: The Blade Trilogy (1998 – 2004)
To talk about today’s trilogy I need to confess something that may undermine any trust I’ve managed to build with my audience... But I'm getting ahead of myself. Today's post features three films: Blade (Stephen Norrington, 1998), Blade II (Guillermo del Toro, 2002), and Blade Trinity (David S. Goyer, 2004) – all together, the Blade Trilogy. View post on Instagram.
October 14: Tetsuo: The Iron Man (Shin'ya Tsukamoto, 1988)
If you're feeling like technology's slave and want to see others who have it worse than you... If you saw Cronenberg's Crash and thought, Well that's a bit tame... If you simply feel like getting weird with metal... check out Tetsuo. I’ve linked it here, but (at the time of writing) it’s also just been added to Shudder. View post on Instagram.
October 15: [Rec] (Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, 2007)
So there I was, not really sure what to expect, slowly and ecstatically realizing that I was watching one of the scariest horror films I’d seen in years. And I wasn’t the only one: people were literally screaming in the theatre. View post on Instagram.
October 16: Children of the Night (Tony Randel, 1991)
This film has one of my favourite lines out of any horror movie: "She's a vampire!! Please don't leave me look under her hat she has a golf club stuck in her head!" View post on Instagram.
October 17: Flesh-Eating Mothers (James Aviles Martin, 1988)
When you're a group of small-town kids who watch 10 movies for 10 days for 10 dollars at least once a month, it's inevitable that at some point you'll scrape the bottom of your local video store's barrel. My friends and I scraped that barrel so hard that some of the wood came away and out popped Flesh-Eating Mothers. View post on Instagram.
October 18: Grabbers (Jon Wright, 2012)
What if the only thing you could do to survive an alien invasion was get (and stay) drunk? This is the premise of Grabbers, which centres around a pub on a small Irish Island. View post on Instagram.
October 19: Pontypool (Bruce McDonald, 2008)
Have you ever looked at a word so long that it lost its meaning? Or rather, have you ever gotten to know a word so well that your mind was boggled by all the potential meanings the word held? Pontypool might just be extra frightening to my fellow writers and editors... View post on Instagram.
October 20: Hour of the Wolf (Ingmar Bergman, 1968)
There is a scene near the beginning of Hour of the Wolf that frightens me so deeply, I couldn’t bring myself to rewatch it before writing this post — at least not now, at night, alone in an attic. View post on Instagram.
October 21: Teeth (Mitchell Lichtenstein, 2007)
The film's protagonist, a teenager called Dawn, is horrified when she first discovers that her vagina is of the bitey variety, but she soon turns it to her advantage, and for this reason I feel like it's possible to regard Teeth as somewhat of a superhero movie. View post on Instagram.
October 22: Taxidermia (György Pálfi, 2006)
What can I say about a film in which a man shooting fire out of his penis is one of the tamer scenes? Watch it! (Or don’t.) It’s truly disgusting, but in such a beautiful way! View post on Instagram.
October 23: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Fran Rubel Kuzui, 1992)
The early ’90s colour palette, the costumes and set design, the cheesy/great lines, the cast (Kristy Swanson, Donald Sutherland, Rutger Hauer, David Arquette, Luke Perry, and Paul "PeeWee Herman" Reubens, among others)... I love it all. View post on Instagram.
October 24: Candyman (Bernard Rose, 1992)
I still remember what people said about Candyman when I was a kid: "There's this movie that's so frightening... you won't be able to sleep after... you'll have nightmares... my older cousin couldn't finish it... etc. etc." At this point I didn't even know what it was about – only that it was terrifying. View post on Instagram.
October 25: Urban Legend (Jamie Blanks, 1998)
In addition to recreating some of your favourite twisted tales, Urban Legend is so ’90s that it actually features famous ‘90s “Noxzema Girl” Rebecca Gayheart (who also starred in Jawbreaker, which is another film I considered posting for Day 25). View post on Instagram.
October 26: Chopper Chicks in Zombietown (Dan Hoskins, 1989)
Within the first ten minutes it does so many politically and/or just morally incorrect things (including a zombie theme song that is frankly so obnoxious it feels unethical) that I can't recommend the film to everyone... but I can recommend it to anyone who loves biker babes, zombies, and schlocky horror. View post on Instagram.
October 27: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992)
I loved the film, and Gary Oldman in it, so much, that I even figured out how to reconfigure my operating system so that every image and sound on my computer came from the film. On startup, Dracula would say, “I’ve crossed oceans of time to find you.” View post on Instagram.
October 28: Double Bill – Season of the Witch (George A. Romero, 1972) and The Love Witch (Anna Biller, 2016)
If you, like me, are a little bit witchy, these films are pretty perfect for laughing at yourself, but also for yearning after witchy paraphernalia. The films are decades apart, but stylistically (editing, acting, art direction, set design...) they feel as though they could've been made at the same time. View post on Instagram.
October 29: The Neon Demon (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2016)
I have to admit that I don't even really remember The Neon Demon that well, except that I left the theatre buzzing. The score, the beautiful sets and people... Elle Fanning's enviably strong-looking neck... The intense, unexpected ending (I'll say no more than that in case you're curious and have not yet seen it). View post on Instagram.
October 30: Ravenous (Antonia Bird, 1999)
It’s funny that I first expected Ravenous to bore me, because in fact there are few films that so enthral me. Beyond the score, each performance is perfect – but especially those of Guy Pearce and Robert Carlyle. It’s not just a competition of who has the weirder mouth, either: they have wonderful chemistry. View post on Instagram.
October 31: Häxan (1922) and Haxän: Witchcraft through the Ages (1968)
It’s a bit of a weird watch, sure, but if you’re looking for occult symbols, boiling cauldrons, witches on broomsticks and the like, you can’t do much better than either version of Häxan. Both are available on YouTube, but for some reason I can only embed the 1968 version here. View post on Instagram.
What did you watch in October? Any highlights? Comment below!