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.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Green Inferno

Film: The Green Inferno
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on gigantic television.

I genuinely don’t like Eli Roth’s films. It’s not just that Roth seems obsessed with gore for gore’s sake, although that’s very much a part of it. It’s that a great deal of Roth’s work is overtly xenophobic. The Hostel movies are in many ways the perfect expression of post-9/11 American nationalism. “Don’t go to Europe and be killed by foreign monsters,” those films say, and the second Hostel compounds this by allowing the main character to avoid her own torture death by buying her way out of it. The Green Inferno is just the same, focused differently. This is a “cannibals in the Amazon” movie, so it’s more xenophobia, but this time, it’s not nationalistic, but overtly racist.

Roth, of course, would deny this charge and would, perhaps correctly claim that a cannibalism story only has a few legitimate places to go. That’s fair, but it doesn’t really change the fact that The Green Inferno presents a world where the indigenous Amazonian tribe is feral and savage and exists entirely in a world where every external threat is viewed as a meal. Even the people who are there to help them and preserve their way of life are nothing more than food, existing only to be treated as savagely as possible before being consumed.

Ten Days of Terror!: Frightmare

Film: Frightmare (1974)
Format: Streaming video from Mometu on Fire!

Things have changed in the movie business. I mean, we know that, but a film like Frightmare (the one from 1974, not the one from the early ‘80s) is clear evidence of those changes. Viewed today, this movie is a bit extreme in terms of its subject matter, but anyone who has watched some modern horror movies has seen things that go a lot further. In fact, the basic subject matter (cannibalism) isn’t that different from something like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, even if this one is a lot more graphic. This was given an X rating when it was first released. Today, it would certainly be R-rated, but five minutes of cuts would drop it to a PG-13.

Any film that touches on a subject like cannibalism is going to be potentially offensive. In the case of Frightmare, the offense isn’t specifically the cannibalism, but the depiction of the person who is the cannibal. In short, this is a film that stigmatizes the mentally ill, something that wasn’t that uncommon 50 years ago. I’m not saying that someone who is a cannibal doesn’t have a problem; I’m saying that the film is essentially depicting anyone with a mental illness as being someone who is dangerous, and that it’s evidently really easy to fake being severely mentally ill.

10 Days of Terror! Kick-Off

I always want to post more than I do, but for the last couple of years, life has really gotten in the way of things. But for years, regardless of anything going on around me, I have posted 40 times in the last ten days of October. Why stop now? I’ve been saving up horror movie posts for the last 12 months just so I can do this.

As usual, there’s a sort of theme to each day, as shown below. Reviews will go up at 1:00 and 7:00 AM and PM, Central time. So, here’s what’s coming:

Satanic Panic

Film: Race with the Devil
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

I believe that I have mentioned my lack of religious belief on this blog before. I also believe that I have mentioned that I grew up in a town that is absolutely religion-soaked. One of claims to fame of the town I grew up in is that it had (and may still have—it was true when I lived there), the second-highest number of churches per capita in the United States. If you were a kid in the early 1980s in a town like that, you lived through the Satanic Panic in a very odd location. That’s going to affect the way that you see a movie like Race with the Devil.

If you don’t remember the Satanic Panic or aren’t old enough to have lived through it, a short primer is worth having. Essentially evangelical Christians decided that Satanic influences and rituals were becoming more and more common and were finding their way into culture and the lives of people around the country. There were alleged to be Satanic influences in movies and TV, in music, and, of course, games like Dungeons & Dragons were purely Satanic. Virtually all of it was nonsense, and the parts that weren’t were entirely fabricated. That’s especially true of the stories of Satanic rituals and ritual murder. It’s worth noting that there’s still a decent amount of Satanic Panic around in parts of the U.S. today.