Ten Days of Terror!: Shorts

Film: The House of the Devil (1896) (The Haunted Castle, Le Manoir du Diable); The Tell-Tale Heart (1953); Kitchen Sink
Format: Internet video on laptop.

I’ve been avoiding shorts on the horror movies list for no real reason other than aesthetic ones. Getting rid of shorts from the list makes it feel a little like cheating; wanting to watch 400 movies per year is a lot easier to accomplish when one of the movies is three minutes long. But it’s time to get through a few of them, and I started with the oldest film on the list, arguably the first-ever horror movie, Georges Melies’s The House of the Devil (otherwise called The Haunted Castle and Le Manoir du Diable).

With a running time of three minutes, we’re not going to get a great deal of plot in this one. That said, this was a long film for the time—this running time was considerable for what people were used to before the turn of the century. Most of the film is Melies learning what he is capable of doing with film. He’s experimenting with making things appear and disappear, something that would be used to astound and amaze people at the time and would be eventually used for both horror effects and comic effects by other directors. In that respect, this is sort of a one-trick pony. We’re going to get a lot of things popping in and out of existence or moving around from spot to spot on screen.

Ten Days of Terror!: Cry of the Banshee

Film: Cry of the Banshee
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

There’s a weird point in horror movie history where suddenly nudity became a part of the picture. There’s an even weirder point in the history of horror movies where nudity crept into classier side of the horror movie industry. I expect nudity when it comes to the seamier side of horror, but it’s for some reason always a little surprising to me when it shows up in something that stars Peter Cushing or Vincent Price. Enter Cry of the Banshee, a Vincent Price vehicle that takes place in Elizabethan England and confronts us with multiple instances of rape and forced nudity.

We’re going to start with magistrate Lord Edward Whitman (Price). We see him preside over a witch trial and condemn the girl to being stripped and whipped through the streets. Later, at a dinner, he brings in a girl and her brother, accuses them of witchcraft, and ends up killing them both. This brings out the ire of his second wife Patricia (Essy Persson), who leaves the party. Because we’re going to want to amp up the sleaze right away, Whitman’s son Sean (Stephan Chase) follows her and forces himself on her, his step-mother. And, because of when this was made, we’re going to see her not merely succumb to this, but accept it, because of course that’s going to happen.

Ten Days of Terror!: I Was a Teenage Werewolf

Film: I Was a Teenage Werewolf
Format: Internet video on Fire!

The phrase “I was a teenage ________” has a long and storied history as the punchline of plenty of jokes. It started with I Was a Teenage Werewolf and its companion film I Was a Teenage Frankenstein in 1957. Werewolf was also the movie that launched the career of Michael Landon just before he hit it really big with “Bonanza.” It’s also a movie that was clearly watched over and over by Paddy Chayefsky before he wrote “Altered States.”

There’s not a lot of mystery about what is going to happen here, right? We’re going to have a teenager named Tony Rivers (Landon) who is going to turn into a werewolf. There are going to be a lot of connections to other films (there’s a lot of Rebel Without a Cause in this, for starters) and there’s a lot of werewolf lore that it stays true to the legends and especially to The Wolf Man.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Final Girls

Film: The Final Girls
Format: DVD from Marengo-Union Library through interlibrary loan on The New Portable.

One thing that has become exceedingly popular in the horror genre is to present the audience with a meta-look at slashers or other subgenres. Scream wasn’t the first self-aware slasher, although it’s still absolutely one of the best, but there have been other horror films that attack not just the characters but the genre. Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, Shaun of the Dead, and The Cabin in the Woods all look at aspects of the genre and, while presenting an actual horror movie, also play with many of the tropes of the genre. The Final Girls was probably inevitable.

We’re initially introduced to Max (Taissa Farmiga) and her mom Amanda (Malin Ackerman) as Amanda auditions for an acting job. We learn that Amanda feels typecast since she appeared as a victim in a classic slasher called Camp Bloodbath, which is clearly an in-film version of Friday the 13th (at least for the uninitiated. It’s actually a lot closer in ways to The Burning). Shortly after this introduction, Max and Amanda are in a serious car accident and Amanda is killed.

Ten Days of Terror!: Pulse

Film: Pulse (2006)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

How many times has the U.S. remake of a good (or great) Japanese horror movie been worth watching? I would suggest that both The Ring and The Grudge probably count. The Ring is a very solid remake that was smart enough to keep things very similar, as well as trying to match the tone and intent of Ringu. The Grudge was smart enough to set things in Japan, just with American characters, so much of what worked in Ju-On still did. Sadly, this is not the case with Pulse, the 2006 remake of Kairo, one of the best Japanese horror films of the current century. (And before anyone says it, yes Let Me In was good enough, but it was a remake of a Swedish movie, not a Japanese one.)

To discuss exactly what is wrong with Pulse, I need to talk about what is right with Kairo. In the original version of this story, people around Tokyo are starting to shut down mentally, emotionally, and physically. There is a rash of suicides and disappearances, and many of them seem to be connected in some ways to electronic devices—phones, PDAs, computers, etc. At times, people who have disappeared or died have sent messages to the living asking for help. As the movie goes on, it becomes clear that there is something infecting the electronic devices and sucking the will from people to live, and the danger and disappearances are spreading. It’s also soon evident that many of the disappearances are not people going into hiding but people who are essentially turning into ash.

Ten Days of Terror!: Bird Box

Film: Bird Box
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

Every now and then, a movie or television show becomes incredibly meme-able. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier has shown up multiple times, as has Thor: Ragnarok. At the end of 2018, that movie was Bird Box. Sandra Bullock wearing a blindfold was a common sight, as was Tom Hollander holding open Jacki Weaver’s eyes. It seems like just about everyone watched Bird Box at the end of 2018 or the start of 2019 except for me. It just wouldn’t be me if I wasn’t a couple years behind on a few things.

While I will go through elements of the narrative here, as I tend to, there is a really easy way to sum up the way Bird Box works. There is a great deal here that plays a lot like A Quiet Place, which came out much earlier in 2018. Honestly, that’s a pretty favorable comparison for Bird Box. A much less favorable one is that there’s also a lot here that plays like The Happening.

Ten Days of Terror!: Diary of a Madman

Film: Diary of a Madman
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

I genuinely enjoy just how dedicated horror movie producers were to sticking with the Gothic through the 1960s. Sure, there are some exceptions and Gothic films continued to be made and are still being made today, but the heyday was the 1960s when horror movies meant castles and Victorian garb and a hell of a lot of Vincent Price. Diary of a Madman is very much in line with that. Taking its inspiration from a Guy de Maupassant story, Diary of a Madman is told in flashback about one man’s interaction with a terrible creature that has the ability to control his mind and commit terrible crimes.

As just mentioned, this takes place in flashback. All we know at this point is that magistrate Simon Cordier (Price) is dead, and that he demanded that a box he entrusted to others be opened upon his death. Since that box is being opened, we can assume he is dead. What we find inside is a diary (no shock; it’s in the title), and the diary tells a dark and twisted tale.