Ten Days of Terror!: Pyewacket

Film: Pyewacket
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

I like folk horror. There’s always a sense, at least to me, of people meddling in the primal evils of the world that feels like it is touching on just how small we are in the universe. Touching on the deeper, darker underlying horror of the world is akin to our own insignificance in the universe. Calling up primordial horrors, at least to me, is no different in terms of story structure to films like The Vast of Night or Aniara, just with a more Lovecraftian vibe. When I come across a movie where people are performing rituals in the middle of nowhere, I’m going to be interested, even if the movie isn’t highly acclaimed. Thus, we have the oddly named Pyewacket.

Leah Reyes (Nicole Muñoz) is a high school student who leans a bit darker in the things that garner her interest. She’s become increasingly interested in the occult since the death of her father, an event that has pushed her away from her mother (Laurie Holden). The final straw for Leah happens when her mother decides that the house they are living in is too filled with memories of her husband, and she decides to move them to a remote house, away from Leah’s friends. The fact that Leah can’t drive makes this feel like both a prison and a punishment.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Dark and the Wicked

Film: The Dark and the Wicked
Format: Streaming video from AMC+ on Fire!

Sub-genres can be useful ways to look at films, but they can be frustrating as well. Take The Dark and the Wicked as an example. Is this a folk horror tale? Kind of. And it’s also a possession story and a haunted house story all at the same time. This is also one of those movies where nothing good happens to anyone. Evil happens and is not so much defeated as endured for as long as possible. Honestly, the title kind of gives that away.

Louise (Marin Ireland) and her brother Michael (Michael Abbott Jr.) return to the family farm in Texas as it appears to be near the end for their father’s (Michael Zagst) chronic illness. He is bed-ridden and there feels like a pall over the house. Their mother (Julie Oliver-Touchstone) seems disturbed and detached, wanting the kids to leave. That night, while preparing dinner, she cuts off the fingers on her hand and dices them and then hangs herself in the barn.

Ten Days of Terror!: Infection

Film: Infection (Kansen)
Format: DVD from Stockton Township Public Library on gigantic television.

I like a good horror movie, and sometimes I like a bad one, evidenced by just how much of the They Shoot Zombies list I have watched. And while I don’t seek out gore, I’m not someone who tends to shy away from it very often. The horror stuff that bothers me isn’t blood or the supernatural or even home invasions. It’s medical stuff. For whatever reason, horror that happens in hospitals, or things happening badly in a medical setting affect me a great deal. Why else would it have taken me a decade to get to Infection (or Kansen if you prefer)?

This is a horror movie that takes place in a hospital. It’s also a film that moves very slowly in terms of the infection in the title. But don’t worry—there’s plenty that is upsetting before we get there. We’re going to be centered in a run-down, underfunded and understaffed hospital. Everyone is overworked, patients are being ignored, and the staff is desperate to keep the hospital open if only to save their own jobs. Two things happen at the same time. One, an ambulance brings in a patient with a strange black rash, but Dr. Akiba (Kōichi Satō) refuses entry to the patient. Second, a patient suffering from severe burns is given the wrong medication and dies on the table. (

Ten Days of Terror!: Horror Rises from the Tomb

Film: Horror Rises from the Tomb (El espanto surge de la tumba)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi on Fire!

At times it feels like there is nothing new under the sun when it comes to movies. Horror Rises from the Tomb (El espanto surge de la tumba in the original Spanish) is a good example of this. While this is its own movie in a lot of respects, there’s a great deal here that comes across as a Spanish version of Mario Bava’s classic Black Sunday. Even the opening sequence is kind of a low-rent version of the same thing. Honestly, I get the desire to crib from Bava’s masterwork, but not when the connections are this obvious.

In the 15th century, a warlock named Alaric de Marnac (Paul Naschy) is captured alongside his equally evil companion Mabille de Lancre (Helga Line). The two are convicted of being followers of Satan, and as punishment, he is decapitated in a field, with his head buried separately from his body; Mabille is also decapitated, but for misogyny reasons of the previous century, she is tortured first. None of this happens before Alaric curses the descendants of the men killing him. This is straight out of Bava’s film, but without the spiked mask.

Ten Days of Terror!: Kuroneko

Film: Kuroneko
Format: Blu-Ray from North Chicago Public Library on rockin’ flatscreen.

National cinemas have their horror styles, which reflect a number of things about the culture from whence they come. You can’t learn everything about a culture from their horror movies, but you can learn something. Japanese horror is often about the slow burn and frequently about vengeful ghosts and unquiet spirits of one kind or another. That’s definitely the case with Kaneto Shindô’s Kuroneko (Black Cat if you want the English or Yabu no naka no kuroneko for its original name—this roughly translates to “a black cat in the bushes”).

What makes this film fun is that we’re not just going to have those staples of J-horror to enjoy, although we will get lots of angry, murderous ghost activity and slowly building tension. No, with Kuroneko we’re also going to get that other staple of Japanese cinema, at least of this era: samurai. Yes, this is a samurai folk horror tale, and that is a wonderful thing to behold.

Ten Days of Terror!: Bloody Moon

Film: Bloody Moon (Die Säge des Todes)
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

Oh, boy. This is going to be interesting because Bloody Moon (or Die Säge des Todes in German, which translates to “The Saw of Death”) is one of those movies that doesn’t make a great deal of sense. This is a movie made by a Spanish director with a German name and mainly German cast, and in the style of an Italian horror movie. That kind of confusion is going to be indicative of what is to come.

I mean that sincerely. This is a movie that exists so that director Jesús Franco could do things like stab a woman through the nipple, saw a woman’s head off, and have an actress simulate sex sounds. There isn’t a lot here that makes cohesive sense beyond a set of loosely-held plot points that sort of go in the same direction.

Ten Days of Terror!: I Saw What You Did

Film: I Saw What You Did
Format: DVD from Ella Johnson Memorial Public Library through interlibrary loan on gigantic television.

There’s a part of me that loves a William Castle movie. Castle’s movies were often campy and goofy and relied at least in part on gimmicks. 13 Ghosts gave the audience special glasses to see the ghosts on screen; The Tingler had movie theaters add seat buzzers to freak out the audience. Because of this, it’s easy to forget that William Castle was actually a decent film director. I Saw What You Did is right up Castle’s alley, but it’s a surprisingly effective little thriller.

In fact, it’s a little surprising that I Saw What You Did hasn’t been remade, although parts of it have certainly been used by other films at times. The central conceit is that a couple of girls and the younger sister of one of them, given a night on their own, decide to make a series of prank calls. And, as it happens, they call the wrong guy on the wrong night and say exactly the wrong thing.