Ten Days of Terror!: Horror Shorts

Film: Dementia; A Warning to the Curious; The Fall of the House of Usher (1928, American)
Format: Various sources, various players.

Fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000 are going to be at least vaguely aware of the existence of Bruno VeSota (or Bruno Ve Sota, as he is sometimes credited). Buttery fat dude VeSota appeared in five MST experiments, most notably to me personally as the chubby club owning foil of Daddy-O. He did one or two notable films, though, perhaps none more bizarre than Dementia from 1955, a film that, at 56 minutes, straddles the border of short and feature-length. What is most noteworthy about this film is the fact that there is no real dialogue included.

Dementia is very clearly an experimental film, if the lack of dialogue didn’t already indicate that. To put it bluntly, this film is an exploration of a descent into madness, a sort of fever dream following the experiences of an unreliable narrator and a bizarre and terrifying evening she spends in and around a seedy hotel, reliving her abusive past, and perhaps committing crimes in the present.

Ten Days of Terror!: Antiviral

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

In the documentary Trekkies, there’s a moment where someone who works at conventions talks about the time that he sold a class of the “Q virus,” a glass of water that actor John de Lancie drank from on a panel while he was extremely sick. Someone in the crowd bought the glass and immediately drank the water, knowing that it was likely he would catch whatever illness de Lancie had at the time. That kind of thinking is at the heart of Antiviral, a movie made by Brandon Cronenberg but that could have easily been made by his father David.

The basic conceit behind Antiviral is that in the future, the idea of celebrity worship has metastasized into something far more obsessive and destructive. One of the main ways in which this is expressed is in the dealing of viruses and pathogens that infect celebrities. So, it’s not just that you can get COVID just like Tom Hanks did. You can be injected with the exact strain of the virus that he had, harvested from his cells. You’re not just getting the same thing; it’s like he’s infected you himself.

Ten Days of Terror!: Ghost Stories

Film: Ghost Stories
Format: Streaming video from AMC + through Amazon Prime on Fire!

Most film anthologies are horror anthologies. I think the reason for that is that horror movies are easier to do in short form. Oh, you can do a comedy this way, and I’ve seen a Western anthology as well, but horror movies are really about the scare. We don’t need to know a great deal about the person beyond the fact that they are in danger for us to care, and we don’t really need more than something creepy to give us the scares. Ghost Stories is a British anthology that gives us a framing story that connects the stories much more firmly that normally happens in this kind of film. It’s a fun premise, even if the ending is one I found very frustrating.

The framing story presents us with Philip Goodman (co-writer/co-director Andy Nyman) lives a lonely life despite having success as a professor and a television presenter who debunks spiritual claims and psychics a la James Randi. In truth, Goodman is more inspired by a Randi-like character named Charles Cameron, who was a debunker in the ‘70s. Goodman is invited to meet with Cameron and discovers that his childhood hero is essentially living in a mobile home, impoverished and ill. Cameron tells him that his life’s work is a joke because there are three cases he could never fully debunk.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Nameless

Film: The Nameless
Format: DVD from Hanover Public Library through interlibrary loan on basement television.

There is a thin line between what makes a movie a horror movie versus a thriller. In my own head, I tend to think of thrillers as films based more in the real world, while horror films tend to have more of a supernatural element. Of course, that’s a line that gets blurred a great deal, more on the horror side of things. There’s nothing supernatural about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Silence of the Lambs (or Hostel for that matter), yet these are clearly horror films. The Nameless (called Los Sin Nombre in the original Spanish, and the copy I watched had the title as the Catalan Els sense nom) is a film that straddles the line between thriller and horror. There are hints of supernatural here, but are they real? Or is it just something that feels like the supernatural because we’ve been manipulated to think that way?

The film begins with the discovery of the body of a young girl. The body is found in a manhole by Spanish police, mutilated beyond recognition. The belief is that everything done to the body was done to mask her identity, but several clues—a bracelet with her name on it and the fact that one of her legs is shorter than the other—leads to her being identified as Angela Gifford. Her parents, Claudia (Emma Vilarasau) and Marc (Brendan Price) are naturally overcome with grief

Ten Days of Terror!: Altered

Film: Altered
Format: Internet video on Fire!

One of the constant problems of watching movies based on a list is that some of the movies will be incredibly difficult to find. I only got through the 1001 Movies list thanks to the fact that NetFlix was still sending out discs in the mail at the time, the catalogs of multiple local libraries, and the assistance of other people working on the same list of movies. While there are more streaming outlets these days, there are fewer other options. And, to be fair, a lot of movies would be easier to find if I was willing to pay to stream them. So, when I find something free on YouTube or DailyMotion, I’m going to watch. In this case, alien science fiction/horror movie Altered showed up on YouTube, so I took the opportunity to cross it off the list.

Altered has some real connection to any film that features any sort of alien attacker, but to me, it felt a great deal like Fire in the Sky. This isn’t aliens invading, as in Signs, but people dealing with abduction and a significant amount of body horror. This is far more a horror movie than it is a science fiction movie. There wouldn’t be a huge difference in how this film works if you turned the alien into a werewolf.

Ten Days of Terror!: Resident Evil: Afterlife

Film: Resident Evil: Afterlife
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.

Here we go again. When you have a touch of the ‘tism, there are things beyond your control that guide at least some of your actions. In my case, it’s a necessity of being complete on things, which is one of the reasons (honestly, probably the reason) that I watch movies based on curated lists. The They Shoot Zombies list has a sublist of, not surprisingly, zombie movies, most of which I have seen, but it felt like another fun list to pursue, and here we are. It’s why I’ve been watching Resident Evil movies against my better judgment, and why I’m now getting through the fourth one, Resident Evil: Afterlife. For this installment, Paul W.S. Anderson has returned to the director’s chair, not that it’s going to make that much of a difference.

It won’t be surprising to hear that Resident Evil: Afterlife has the exact same problem as its two predecessors. Picking up from the previous film, Alice (Milla Jovovich) and her clones attack the main Umbrella Corporation facility in Tokyo, wiping out everyone aside from the chairman, Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts), who has injected himself with the T-virus. The original Alice has stowed away on Wesker’s escape craft, but naturally he’s going to continue to survive, and in this case, he’s going to inject Alice with an anti-virus that removes all of her supernatural abilities. This doesn’t seem to remove her ability to survive their plane crashing into a mountain, an accident from which she walks away essentially unscathed.

Ten Days of Terror!: Resident Evil: Extinction

Film: Resident Evil: Extinction
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.

I’d love to say lots of nice things about Resident Evil: Extinction, but that’s not the world that we live in. As much as I am personally and oddly fascinated by the career of Paul W.S. Anderson and as much as I will apologize for a lot of his films, I can’t bring myself to say a lot nice about this film, which was written and produced by him. There is a sense to this film that the story isn’t really that important, and even the franchise doesn’t matter much. Instead, the entire point of the film is about spectacle for its own sake.

I promise I’m going to go into some detail on this, but I want to set a sort of general idea of what I’m talking about first. Resident Evil: Extinction is a collection of scenes that are connected to each other, and there is a semblance of plot here, but very little sense of the larger story or the reality of the world that the film wants to exist in. It’s an odd little snapshot that exists for its own sake without a sense of anything larger. Things happen because they would “look cool” on screen. Stupid decisions are made for the sake of spectacle with no sense of reality, even the reality projected by the film series.