Ten Days of Terror!: Pearl

Film: Pearl
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on gigantic television.

I need to deal with my Mia Goth issue. Everyone seems to like Mia Goth more than I do. I am convinced that this stems from where I was introduced to her on the screen. I first saw her in A Cure for Wellness, a film that should have been better and was also marred by the presence of Dane DeHaan, an actor I have never warmed to. Goth probably deserves better from my opinion, and the fact that she is the clear darling of the modern horror crowd means I’m going to have to get used to her. Pearl, a film I have avoided for a couple of years, is the next step in this evolution for me.

Pearl is prequel to Ti West’s X, the first movie where we are introduced to the Pearl character. In the first film, Goth plays both Maxine and Pearl (under a good amount of prosthetic makeup to age her). Pearl is a disturbed character, something that tends to be fascinating to horror movie fans, so it makes sense that people would want this—an origin story. That said, if you haven’t seen X, this discussion is necessarily going to involve spoilers for that film. We can’t talk about Pearl without talking about the character, after all. Consider the rest of this under a spoiler tag specifically for X and not Pearl. You’ve been warned.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Girl Who Knew Too Much

Film: The Girl Who Knew Too Much (The Evil Eye)
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

I get frustrated with variant versions of films. I understand why they exist, but that doesn’t mean that I have to like the confusion that they cause. The Girl Who Knew Too Much (literally translated from the Italian La ragazza che sapeva troppo) is typically thought of as the original giallo. But, because American International Pictures wasn’t convinced of the film’s marketability, a different version was released in the U.S. under the name The Evil Eye. The basic plot is the same in both versions, of course, but the American version is a touch longer, emphasizes more comedy, and comes with a separate soundtrack.

What it means for me in this case, is that while looking for The Girl Who Knew Too Much, I could only find the American version, about six minutes longer, but more comedic, and thus a bit less of a traditional giallo despite essentially starting the style. I guess this is what happens when there’s an American version and I’m sitting in the middle (sorta) of America. You get what you can get. I suppose I shouldn’t complain since I was able to watch it at all.

Ten Days of Terror!: Black Belly of the Tarantula

Film: Black Belly of the Tarantula (La tarantola dal ventre nero)
Format: Streaming video from AMC on gigantic television.

Horror movies are often judged on the quality of their kills. When people talk about slasher movies, for example, they talk about the killers, but mostly in the context of the various kills. People like Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers based on their presence, but also based on their kill count and the actual kills themselves. The murder method may be the most important aspect of a movie killer. Over a franchise, this comes down to amount of blood and diversity of kills. In a single movie, it’s about the specific method itself. This is the main thing that makes Black Belly of the Tarantula (or La tarantola dal ventre nero work as well as it does.

In fact, in Black Belly of the Tarantula it’s less about the killing itself and more about the set up. The actual murders are pretty standard slasher fare—a knife and a lot of Jack the Ripper-like deep slashes. What makes all of this interesting is that before the victims are killed, they are injected with a wasp venom that leaves them conscious but paralyzed. In the natural world, wasps do this to large spiders, paralyzing them and then laying an egg in them; the egg then hatches and devours the still-living spider while the wasp is in its larval form. In this movie, our victims are merely sliced up and killed.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Perfume of the Lady in Black

Film: The Perfume of the Lady in Black (Il profumo della signora in nero)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi on Fire!

I like horror movies in general, but I have a particular fondness for psychological horror. I’ve never been a gorehound; I don’t shy away from it much, but I generally only like it when it is relevant to the plot and not just there as fan service. But psychological horror is always interesting to me because I find myself much more in tune with the people in the film. They don’t know what is happening, and I’m trying to figure it out as well. While I don’t typically like giallo films, the fact that it’s all about the psychology is a point in favor of The Perfume of the Lady in Black (or Il profumo della signora in nero if you want it in the Italian).

The movie that I am most put in mind of is something like Let’s Scare Jessica to Death. This is a movie that feels like gaslighting, and that’s not a spoiler. That’s entirely the point of the film. Once things start, we’re going to spend the entire running time determining whether or not Silvia (Mimsy Farmer) is being gaslit, if we as the audience are being gaslit, or if Silvia is an extremely unreliable narrator.

Ten Days of Terror!: Baron Blood

Film: Baron Blood
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

I have not been shy about my issues with Italian-style horror on this blog over the past decade or so. There are plenty of genres, directors, and performers who I have grown to appreciate or even like the more I have been exposed to them. When I started this blog, I didn’t understand the appeal of Bette Davis, nor did I care at all for Colin Farrell, and I’ve seen the light on both of them. The same cannot be said for giallo films or Italian horror in general, so every time I decide to cross another one off the list, I sigh inwardly, hoping that this might be the one that changes my mind. Baron Blood (or the far more fanciful Gli orrori del castello di Norimberga in the original Italian), another film from Mario Bava, will not be the one that convinces me to change my mind.

True to what seems to often be the case with films of this stripe, we’re going to have an Italian-style horror film from an Italian director taking place in another part of the world, Austria in this case. We’re also going to have a pretty standard plot on the surface. Peter Kleist (Antonio Cantafora) arrives in Austria from the U.S. to look up some family history. It turns out that Peter is the descendant of Baron Otto Von Kleist, who was very much a Vlad the Impaler-style sadist who tortured and murdered his villagers, hence his nickname of Baron Blood. One of these was a witch named Elizabeth Hölle, who cursed him with a spell that would allow him to be raised from the dead so that she could revenger herself on him again and again.

Ten Days of Terror!: Blood Diner

Film: Blood Diner
Format: Streaming video from Tubi on Fire!

Years ago, I did some podcasting. I also had a couple of years in the past where I accepted “challenge” films from other film nerds. I say this because one person is responsible for me watching two movies that are relevant to Blood Diner. I was tasked with podcasting about a movie called The Undertaker and His Pals, where a couple of guys who run a restaurant murder people and put them on the menu. I was also challenged to watch Herschel Gordon Lewis’s Blood Feast, where a man tries to resurrect an ancient goddess by creating a “feast” of body parts.

I will talk about Blood Diner here, but I need to discuss those two films a little bit. The Undertaker and His Pals is one of the worst movies I have ever seen. It’s intended to be both disgusting and wacky, and while there are some real gross-out moments, the humor doesn’t rise to the level of juvenile. I didn’t like Blood Feast much, either, but I see it as an important movie. It’s one of the first movies of its era to really lean into the gore aspects of its story, what little story there is. Blood Feast is all about severed limbs and women having their tongues ripped out, and we wouldn’t have the gore films that we do now without it.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Shallows

Film: The Shallows
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on rockin’ flatscreen.

I think it takes a certain amount of guts to make a shark movie. Jaws is not merely the definitive shark movie, but might well be the definitive “Man vs. Nature” movie. The characters are well-created and we genuinely feel for them and want them to survive. The shark is terrifying in large part because it spends most of the movie hidden. A lot of things have been attempted with shark movies. The Shallows goes the route of minimalism, and it’s genuinely the right choice.

One thing that makes The Shallows effective as a film is that it relies in large part on something that is true: the majority of shark attacks happen in shallow water and close to the beach. It’s true in the real world, and in the cinematic world, it means that the safety of dry land is always going to be visible and tantalizingly close.