Ten Days of Terror!: The Grapes of Death

Film: The Grapes of Death (Les raisins de la mort, Pesticide)
Format: Streaming video from AMC through Amazon Prime on Fire!

There are conversation, often heated, in the horror community, about what technically makes a zombie movie Your absolute purists are going to say that what most people call “zombies” are actually ghouls, flesh-eating, reanimated corpses. Zombies are specifically reanimated by Voodoo. A lot of people will say that Romero’s Dead films are zombie films—they feature reanimated corpses. 28 Days Later, by that argument, is not a zombie film because the monsters are merely infected, not resurrected dead. I bring this up because on the Zombie sub-list of the They Shoot Zombies list, the distinction seems to be about how the creatures act, not their source. It’s why The Grapes of Death (or Les raisins de la mort and more rarely Pesticide) appears on the list despite our creatures being infected, not reanimated.

I am of the opinion that it’s more about behavior than anything else, which is why I don’t really object to films like Night of the Comet and Pontypool being classified as zombie films, or at least zombie-esque films. The Grapes of Death certainly falls into this gray area, since we’re going to be dealing with people who are suffering from a sort of fungal infection to turn them mindless and murderous, a sort of precursor to The Girl with All the Gifts. In fact, I would suggest that Romero’s The Crazies, which predates this by about a half decade, is the inspiration for much of what happens in this film.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Lift

Film: The Lift (De Lift)
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

“Technology gone amok” is one of the most common science fiction plots. If I asked you to think of a movie where people fight against the technology that they or someone else has created, where technology tries to take over, destroy humanity, or just starts killing, you could probably think of a dozen in less than a minute. Cult horror (Demon Seed, Videodrome, Chopping Mall, Hardware), low-budget exploitation films (Maximum Overdrive, Deadly Friend), genre classics (The Terminator, Christine), and mainstream blockbusters (Jurassic Park, Avengers: Age of Ultron) happily use and recycle this basic idea. Sometimes we get a classic. Sometimes, we get a movie where the people essentially line up to die. Such is the case with Dutch film The Lift (or De Lift if you prefer).

As the name suggests, The Lift is about a killer elevator. This is not a “people trapped in an elevator” movie like Devil, but a film where people are literally killed by an elevator through a variety of methods, or at least the variety of methods that could be used by an elevator. It’s not like the killer lift in question goes roaming through the streets looking for victims.

Ten Days of Terror!: Deadly Friend

Film: Deadly Friend
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

Deadly Friend, tonally, might be the weirdest movie I’ve ever seen. This is very clearly a horror movie, but tuned five degrees to the left, this is a wacky comedy. It appears to want to be Wes Craven’s version of Chopping Mall but it’s much more Wes Craven’s version of Weird Science or Short Circuit. It also contains one of the genuinely funniest and most ridiculous kills I have ever seen. I don’t quite know how to react to any of this.

Deadly Friend starts as a mid-‘80s sci-fi comedy. Paul Conway (Matthew Labyorteaux) and his mother Jeannie (Anne Twomey) have just moved to a new town in part because Paul is an electronic and robotics prodigy. Despite him being a teen, he is in advanced college classes, and he is developing a robot he calls BB (voiced by Charles Fleischer). We’re told that BB is incredibly advanced, and the robot does demonstrate some autonomy, specifically in terms of protecting Paul.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Bay

Film: The Bay
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

When I hear that something is a “mockumentary,” I tend to think more spoof than anything else. This is Spinal Tap is a mockumentary because it’s funny. Some would call The Bay a mockumentary, except that this is not even remotely close to being funny. I would call it a fictional documentary. This is definitely a found footage film, but it’s found footage disguised as a documentary, so it’s clearly edited and is presented as using that found footage to tell a factual story.

A lot of our time is going to be spent with Donna Thompson (Kether Donohue), who was a reporter in the town of Claridge, MD, reporting on the Fourth of July celebration. Everything seems to be normal until people suddenly start getting violently ill. This includes boils and rashes that eventually prove fatal, because those boils and rashes are caused by isopods that have mutated and grown huge thanks to environmental pollution in the water off the coast. Specifically, the water is the dumping ground for waste from the local chicken farm, and the waste is laced with chemicals and growth hormones.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Flesh and the Fiends

Film: The Flesh and the Fiends
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!

Of all the creepy, ghoulish, real-world horrors from the 19th century United Kingdom, two stand out as being the most cinematic. The first is certainly that of Jack the Ripper, who has been the subject of films as far back as the ‘20s. The second is the story of Burke and Hare, two “resurrection men” (graverobbers) of Edinburgh who decided to supplement their income of selling bodies to doctors for dissection by murdering their victims to create those bodies. While body snatching films showed up before 1960, The Flesh and the Fiends appears to be the first film specifically about Burke and Hare, or at least having characters with those names.

In Georgian London, Dr. Knox (Peter Cushing) is a popular lecturer at a medical college, even if he is less well-liked by his colleagues. The biggest problem he faces is one of a lack of suitable bodies for study, a problem that he tends to solve with the aid of graverobbers. The problem there is that most of the bodies he gets are in the ground a good week before he has a chance to use them. He passes on the chore of paying for the bodies to his assistant Mitchell (Dermot Walsh) and a young, desperate, and failing student named Jackson (John Cairney).

Ten Days of Terror!: Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

Film: Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

I think the connection between Christmas and horror is about subversion of expectations. Christmas tends to be thought of as more of a happy holiday—we get together with family and friends, we give gifts, and we eat lots of food. The reality, of course, is that Christmas and the holidays are a difficult time of year for a lot of people. But there’s a sense of innocence, even with the reality that suicides increase during the holidays. So, something evil happening feels right in a lot of ways, both in terms of being shocking from what we expect, and also because it kind of is what we expect. And that’s going to bring us to Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (or, just Rare Exports if you prefer).

As the film starts, we find ourselves in the Lapland part of Finland. An American/British research team is drilling at the top of a large mountain, which is assumed to be an ancient burial mound. All of this is observed by Juuso (Ilmari Järvenpää) and Pietari (Onni Tommila). Pietari is convinced that Santa Claus is real and punishes bad children, something that Juuso finds ridiculous. All of this happens just as the company starts using explosives to excavate the mound.

Ten Days of Terror!: Silent Night, Deadly Night

Film: Silent Night, Deadly Night
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

The more I think about it, the more the idea of holiday-themed horror movies makes sense to me. I don’t mean those movies that are built around a holiday (New Year’s Evil, Halloween, My Bloody Valentine, etc.) but ones that are specifically about the Christmas season. Like it or not, horror is often about the subverting of innocence. It’s why movies with evil children are so effective. Christmas is a holiday of joy and childlike wonder. What could be more evil than ruining that? And so, we get a movie like Silent Night, Deadly Night. This is not just a slasher that takes place around Christmas, but one that dresses up our murderer like Santa Claus himself.

And really, that’s the selling point here. There are a number of horror and slasher films that play on the idea of an evil Santa, but none are more infamous than Silent Night, Deadly Night. It is an extremely transgressive film in that respect, even if the main plot takes about half the movie to get going. We’re going to get some nudity and violence right away, a building of trauma, and then our slasher goes hog wild while dressed as Saint Nick.