Ten Days of Terror!: Lights Out

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

The thing that made the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre revolutionary was not the implied blood, but the fact that everything happened in bright daylight. There was no hiding the horror in the shadows. The makers of Lights Out evidently decided that this was a bad idea and created a movie with the opposite premise. Our monster in this film can’t appear in light—it’s light that causes her to disappear. That premise seems really scary on the surface, but when it comes to a film, it means the audience isn’t going to see a damned thing.

On the surface, I get this decision. Having a creature that you can’t really see or get a close look at is scary, and the film is actually smart enough at one point to create a method for us to see the monster in question. Up to that point, though, this is a movie that lives almost literally in the shadows. Scary for the characters in the narrative, but frustrating for the audience trying to see anything.

Ten Days of Terror!: The White Reindeer

Film: The White Reindeer (Valkoinen peura)
Format: Streaming video from AMC+ on Fire!

Lycanthropy is a pretty common trope not just in movies, but in culture. We tend to think “werewolves” when the idea comes up, but different cultures have different animals that evil people turn into. The DC character King Shark is based off the Hawaiian legend of Nanaue, a man who could turn into a shark. Not all of the were-creatures are as viscerally threatening as a wolf or a shark. Case in point is The White Reindeer (Valkoinen peura), a Finnish horror film where the title character is a shapeshifter.

The White Reindeer is very much a folk tale, the sort of story that feels like it was told around a fire at night by Laplanders herding reindeer. A girl is born to a Finnish family. Her mother Maarita (Mirjami Kuosmanen) names her Pirita (also eventually played by Mirjami Kuosmanen). It is prophesied that Pirita will become the subject of a great song of the people. Of course, all great tales need a hero, but they also need a villain.

Ten Days of Terror!: Spring

Film: Spring
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!

There’s a surprising amount of romance in the horror genre. Gothic films often have a strong romance element in them. In fact, when Dracula was released in 1931, it was advertised as the strangest passion the world has ever known. These days, we have Guillermo del Toro and the whole (pardon the expression) “monsterfucker” crowd, people who have an apparent fetish for monsters in one way or another. Enter Spring, a movie that starts as a romance, clearly becomes body horror, but stays a romance for the running time.

Evan (Lou Taylor Pucci) watches his mother die from cancer, and days later, after her funeral, gets into a fight in the bar he works at. The man who incurred his wrath finds out where Evan lives and plans to press charges, and the fight costs Evan his job. While he doesn’t want to necessarily leave his friend Tommy (Jeremy Gardner), Evan decides that discretion is the better part of valor. He grabs his passport, heads to the airport, and hops on the first flight he can get out of the country, winding up in Italy.

Ten Days of Terror!: Pathogen

Film: Pathogen
Format: Streaming video from Fawesome on Fire!

We need to talk about Pathogen, the 2006 movie written and directed by Emily Hagens. There are plenty of zombie movies and plenty of movies directed by women. But how many movies, let alone zombie movies, are there directed by a 12-year-old girl? That’s the case with this one—a true product of a child’s ambition. That, if for no other reason, makes this worth seeing.

What this means, though, is that you shouldn’t really go into this with a lot of expectations of Pathogen being a masterpiece. It’s not. It is exactly what you expect in a lot of ways—it has virtually no budget and everyone involved in it is an amateur. This is evident from the opening moments through to the end. The zombies are just folks Emily knew, as are everyone else in the cast. The effects are going to happen off-camera because she didn’t have the budget to show much. Camera angles are spotty, line reads are wooden. And you know what? It doesn’t matter a bit.

Ten Days of Terror!: Day of the Dead (2008)

Film: Day of the Dead (2008)
Format: Streaming video from Hoopla on Fire!

I suppose a remake of George Romero’s Day of the Dead was inevitable. We got a 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead, which turned out pretty good. The 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead had some issues, but it made up for them with buckets of blood. The 2008 remake of Day of the Dead is more a spiritual remake in that there are similarities to the original, but these are surface similarities only. This feels like more of an attempt to capitalize on the name more than anything else. It’s a zombie movie, but it’s one that doesn’t seem like it exists in the same universe.

The biggest issue with Day of the Dead is that it is staggeringly inconsistent with its own rules. This is a movie that sets up the parameters of the zombie plague and how it works and then routinely alters those rules if the plot demands it or there’s some scare to be had from breaking its own rules. It’s a cardinal sin of movie making in my opinion. Worse than being a bad movie is being a lazy one, and not much is lazier than breaking your own rules because you haven’t found an in-world way to work out what you want to have happen.

Ten Days of Terror!: Versus

Film: Versus (Vasasu)
Format: DVD from Harvard Diggins Public Library through interlibrary loan on rockin’ flatscreen.

There are times when the premise of a movie is far better than the actual movie that is produced. It’s the cinematic equivalent of someone’s eyes being bigger than their stomach. Coming up with a fun idea or a crazy mashup is easier than actually having that crazy mashup make sense. Versus (Vasasu, which is as close as you can get to “versus” in Japanese) is that film. This is a movie made on a shoestring budget (something like $10,000 in 2000) where it’s clear that the film itself can’t live up to the promise of the idea.

If I told you that this is a movie where the reincarnation of an ancient samurai battles with the Yakuza in a forest where the dead come back to life—including many of the dead that the Yakuza have buried there—you might perk up if you are an action fan or a horror fan. When I add that the head of the Yakuza in the film is actively attempting to open a gate to Hell, and is also a reincarnated figure from the past, you can see that we have something like a story. And then the film plays and lives up to none of it.

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.