'73 on the run

A screaming came across the sky...When are ya gonna come down, when are ya gonna land...I am the motherfucking shore patrol...I can almost remember their funny faces...When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional...She's the Godmother of them all...The power of Christ compels you...and everything under the sun is in tune, but the sun is eclipsed by the moon.

January- Nixon is inaugrated for a second term as president. 

Roe v. Wade: The Supreme Court overturns state bans on abortion. 

Schoolhouse Rock debuts. 

Nixon announces a peace accord has been reached in Vietnam.

Watergate burglars G. Gordon Liddy and James McCord were convicted of conspiracy, burglary and placing illegal recording devices in the DNC Headquarters. 

February- Members of the American Indian Movement begin a 71 day occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Around 200 people participated in protest of the US government's failure to honor tribal treaties. 

March- Pink Floyd release Dark Side of the Moon and begin a 736 week occupation of the Billboard 200. 

Eight members of the Palestinian terrorist group known as Black September took control of the Saudi Arabian embassy in Sudan, taking 10 diplomats hostage. In exchange for the hostages, the terrorists demanded the release of several Palestinians being held in Israeli prisons. 

Marlon Brando boycotts the Oscars. 

April- The World Trade Center opens in New York City

Influential avant garde artist Pablo Picasso dies

July- Legendary actor and martial artist Bruce Lee dies at the age of 32

September- In Chile, a group of military officers led by Augusto Pinochet, seized power in a coup d'etat overthrow of democratic socialist Salvador Allende.

October- Elton John releases what is considered to be his best work, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

The Sydney Opera House opens. 

The price of oil increases by 200% due to the Yom Kippur War and Arab nations restricting oil from nations supporting Israel. 

December 26- The Exorcist opens in theaters. 

New Hollywood was burning bright. The directors of the movement had a love for Classic Hollywood films as they were reacting to it. Just look at The Long Goodbye's Philip Marlowe and compare it to The Big Sleep's Philip Marlow. Film noirs of the 40s had a moral code. Bleak, yes, but there were rules. You'd be hard pressed to find morals in Altman's version of Marlowe. 

The crime film may have hit its peak this year. With it, came a flood of bleak images. The shocking aftermath of gang rape in Serpico. The violent criminals of Mean Streets. If you think you can escape the urban spaces, think again. Terence Malick's Badlands tells of a killing spree playing out in South Dakota. In Depression-era Chicago, two grifters seek the big con in The Sting. The crime film during this time was populated with the lonely, friendless small timers, pool hall junkies, ordinary people taking matters into their own hands. But that wasn't all the year had to offer. 

When you go through this year, an emerging pattern of quality and diversity kept itself present. Comedies like Sleeper nestle alongside experiments like F For Fake. Grindhouse classics like Coffy play on 42nd Street. If you go up a few blocks to a more refined theater where you don't have to fear for you life, you can treat yourself to American Graffiti. 

If you turned on CBS on a Satuday night, this was the programming:

8:00 All In the Family

8:30 MASH

9:00 The Mary Tyler Moore Show

9:30 Bob Newhart

10:00 Carol Burnett

In addition to the amount of high quality movies we got, this year might also be my favorite for music. Progressive rock bands were firing on all cylinders. The Glam scene was still going strong. Classic rock bands like Led Zeppelin and The Who were pumping out some of their best works. 

I might as well leave a list here:

1. Pink Floyd- Dark Side of the Moon

2. Elton John- Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

3. Genesis- Selling England By the Pound

4. Paul McCartney and Wings- Band On the Run

5. Led Zeppelin- Houses of the Holy

6. Frank Zappa- Over-nite Sensation

7. King Crimson- Larks Tongues In Aspic

8. The Who- Quadrophenia

9. Iggy Pop and the Stooges- Raw Power

10. Yes- Tales From Topographic Oceans

11. David Bowie- Aladdin Sane

12. Tom Waits- Closing Time

13. Roxy Music- For Your Pleasure

14. Budgie- Never Turn Your Back On A Friend

15. Black Sabbath- Sabbath Bloody Sabbath

Then you had the books. Thomas Pynchon released his biggest and most complex work to date with Gravity's Rainbow, JG Ballard unleashed his masterpiece of auto erotica Crash, Hunter S. Thompson produced a more than worthy follow up to Fear and Loathing with Fear and Loathing On the Campaign Trail '72, Kurt Vonnegut went all out with his biting American satire Breakfast of Champions. The amount of high quality art in every medium coming out was just insane. 

So we arrive at a set of questions: why was 1973 more productive in high quality art than the current year? Why is 1973 considered a better year in film than the current year? 

Let's look at two charts. 

The top grossing films of 1973:

The Exorcist

The Sting

American Graffiti

Papillon

The Way We Were

Magnum Force

Live and Let Die

Robin Hood

Paper Moon

Serpico

The top grossing films of 2023 (Domestic):

Barbie 

The Super Mario Bros. Movie

Spider-Man: Across the Universe

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

Oppenheimer

The Little Mermaid

Avatar: The Way of Water

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

John Wick: Chapter 4

Sound of Freedom

The giant outlier in this observation, if you don't count right wing propaganda like Sound of Freedom, being Oppenheimer. A film that dominated the summer with another fantasy film, Barbie. 

Things are worse now than they were in 1973. Only this time, it's not being reflected through art. There are caveats of course. A24, indie and foreign films. But we're looking at the broader picture here. Instead, escapism has taken center stage. Superhero movies and fantasy worlds dominate the multiplexes. Corporations have gotten smarter. Who needs a revolution when they can sell you a watered down version of one? Public Enemy was right about the revolution not being televised. Today, it won't even go viral on YouTube. But let's go back to the subject at hand: 1973. 

In three years, the US would have a new president and some sense of direction. We were still carrying the collective PTSD of the late 60s. Nixon was still in office and the fallout from the Watergate break- in had captured national attention. Tune in to find out what happens with this development next year. For now, I leave you with the best of a year littered with films that will make countless best-of lists. Whether the one coming for you is a one-eyed hell raiser with a shotgun or the Godmother of 'Em All. You're gonna find something to your liking. 

Because there is no dark side of the moon, really. Matter of fact, it's all dark. 

1. The Exorcist

William Peter Blatty originally went to bat for William Friedkin to direct. The studio refused to consider him. Meanwhile, the studio approached Arthur Penn to adapt, who ignored the project because he didn't want to make another violent film like Bonnie and Clyde. Stanley Kubrick passed. As did Mike Nichols, who didn't want to attempt a film that hinged on a child's performance. Friedkin's rejection from Warner Bros. turned into major consideration after The French Connection took off. 

The book still terrifies to this day. Starting with medical tests, then turning into a bit of a crime narrative with the murder of Dennings and the investigation by Kinderman, then going into clinical detail about the history and procedure of an exorcism. Comparing speech patterns, getting permission from the church, etc. 

This is why Friedkin was the perfect choice to take this story on. His first picture was a documentary, the People Vs. Paul Crump. He brings a documentary like aesthetic to the film. 

Having said this, the documentary aspect grounds us for the beating heart of the story: Father Karras' journey. It's a story of sacrificial love against despair. 

"And yet I think the demon's target is not the possessed; it is us...the observers...every person in the house. And I think- I think the point is to make us despair; to reject our own humanity, Damien; to see ourselves as ultimately bestial, vile and putrescent; without dignity; ugly; unworthy. And there lies the heart of it, perhaps: in unworthiness. For I think belief in God is not a matter of reason at all; I think it finally is a matter of love: of accepting the possibility that God could ever love us."

Both Friedkin and Blatty struck gold because the story tackles uncertainty. People of all religions feel scared when they feel their strongly held beliefs are being threatened.

It is why, when the studio pumped out a sequel four years later, it missed the mark entirely. It is also why the latest installment, Exorcist: Believer, has been received so poorly by critics and audiences alike. It neither titallates or entices. As Mark Kermode put it, "It was made by people who've seen the original but haven't seen the the original." The only installment to come close is one Blatty directed himself: The Exorcist III. Based off his own book, Legion. As for the rest, they are unworthy. 

The movie has stood as king of the mountain when it comes to what I consider favorite horror films. This can be a mainstream "oh everyone thinks that" type of response when someone asks me what is the film that scares me the most. But I can't deny the realism in which Friedkin grounds this story in. It's why French Connection continues to make my jaw drop. Why Sorcerer makes my heart thump like a jackhammer. He has since gone on to say he doesn't consider it a horror movie and how he would never make a movie the way he did in the 70's. 

2. The Wicker Man

It's never scary. Instead, it is filled with a specific unease and dread. It's in broad daylight and there is a jovial, sex infused atmosphere with a wicked undercurrent. All of this grows larger and larger until it bursts in a blaze of blazing hellfire and cheerful singing. The way this film creates its world of disarming disconnects, moments where you feel unsettled but can't put your finger on why, and when you do find out, it's too late, is a testament to the script, Robin Hardy's direction and the hypnotic soundtrack by Paul Giovanni. 

3. Don't Look Now

So many novelists play with time and past and future tenses. This only begs the question: why are we not doing this in film? Sure there's Nolan. But I think the two directors who really nail this are Lynch and Roeg. In trying to duplicate how the mind and memory work, Roeg is able to break free from linear filmmaking. No more is this apparent in Don't Look Now. Specifically, two scenes: the opening and the Sutherland/Christie sex scene. 

4. The Long Goodbye

One of the calmest thrillers out there. So when the ending comes, it arrives like a thunder clap on a quiet evening. Yes, there's the cat. But there's also Henry Gibson slapping Sterling Hayden, a mute Arnold Schwarznegger playing the lackey of a mobster, a dreamy double exposure-like shot of a mirror reflecting Marlowe on the beach while Hayden is talking to Nina van Pallandt, the shocking coke bottle scene. Top 3 Altman. Hoo-ray for Hollywood.

5. Messiah of Evil

Every time I watch this movie, it rises higher and higher. 

William Huyck and Gloria Katz wrote the script in 6 weeks inspired by their love of Lovecraft. It exists in the middle of a venn diagram of stuff I love: seaside horror, cosmic horror, mood/atmosphere over plot. I've had multiple dreams where I am in an urban space and zombie like creatures attack. This film nails that feeling. When I think of the list of unsung horror masterpieces to come out of the 70's, this is right at the top. 

6. Coffy

One of the best female performances in cinema history belongs to Pam Grier in this movie. 

I always thought of Jack Hill as the Howard Hawks of exploitation. He dabbled in so many subgenres: horror, the cheerleader pic, blaxpoitation, women in prison, the race car picture. Out of all of them, Coffy is the one I get the most mileage out of. On the list of movies I desperately want to see on the big screen with a big audience. 

7. F For Fake

Orson started his career on radio and smoothly transitioned into film, where his love for the narrative essay blossomed with his first two pictures, Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. It is a natural evolution to where he ends up with his final film (released during his lifetime) in 1973. 

I've yet to see a movie where Welles is having more fun. At this point in his career, can anyone blame him? The visual essay has been done to death on youtube. It can all be traced back to this story of forgery.

And now, with your permission, a bit of verse by Kipling. "When first the flush of a newborn sun fell on the green and gold, our father Adam, sat under the tree and scratched with a stick in mold. The first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his might heart. Till a devil whispered behind the leaves, "It's pretty. But is it art?"" 

8. The Spook Who Sat By the Door

Let's get one thing out of the way. There is a difference between Blaxpoitation and films celebrating black power and fighting back against white supremacy. An example of the former can be found in films like Shaft and Superfly. This film can be classified in the latter category.  

A lot of movies claim to be 'edgy and dangerous'. This film actually is one. The print was confiscated by the FBI after being screened. It's not hard to understand why when you watch it. A toast to ACAB.

I'd go on but a favorite podcast of mine is more eloquent: https://cinepunx.com/twitch-of-the-death-nerve-episode-26-the-spook-who-sat-by-the-door

9. The Last Detail

Simple, character-driven storytelling. The kind Hal Ashby and writer Robert Towne excelled at. It's those dissolves. It's the profane Nicholson. The shy Quaid. The unsung Young. Ya know what I mean? 

10. Thriller: A Cruel Picture

Christina Lindberg as One Eye is an iconic figure in the realm of exploitation. I was fortunate enough to meet her at a convention. This movie is a punch to the jaw that doesn't stop pummeling you until it's over. Seek out the full uncut version. 

11. Paper Moon

Peter Bogdonavich's films are love letters to the movies of yesteryear. Yes he's a snob. Yes he has as jagged a career as Ridley Scott. After three hits in a row, he wouldn't attain this stature for the rest of his career. A career being rife with adequate comebacks (Saint Jack, They All Laughed) and roiled in controversy with Polly Platt, who is production designer on this film. 

The movie manages to be heartwarming without falling into corniness. Watching Tatum and Ryan outmatch and outwit each other is like a tennis match. 

Verna Fields was an editor on this film. The same Verna Fields who cut Jaws. It explains the perfect pacing of the film. 

12. American Graffiti

A movie whose soundtrack I've worn out from listening to it so often in my car. Before there was The Wonder Years and Dazed and Confused, this was the jukebox of a generation. A loosey goosey hang out picture harkening back to a time and a place. 

13. World On A Wire

A two part science fiction paranoia epic from a world class auteur in Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Unfortunately it slows down a bit in its second part but the overall look and feel of the project is enough to warrant a high spot on this list. It's philosophical sci-fi before it became cool. Before it made the protagonist go "Whoa." 

Dips into simulated worlds designed not to prevent wars and other conflicts, but to predict consumer models. 

14. The Holy Mountain

Endlessly appealing from a visual perspective. Just one jaw dropping scene after another.  The first 45 minutes or so are good and all. But it's when they start abandoning the whole 'retelling of Christ' story to more free flowing narrative and going into weapons made to cater to one's religion, that is when it hits it's potential. 

15. Lady Snowblood

The blood in this movie is red. Not just any kind of red, Herschell Gordon Lewis red. The color is as bold as Meiko Kaji's razor sharp precision of cuts with her blade. 

Meiko Kaji made a name for herself with the Stray Cat Rock and Female Prisoner Scorpion series. A brief period of 1970 thru 1973 where she dominated the particular scene. The almost ballet-like choreography of violence had a major inspiration on Kill Bill. 

16. Charley Varrick

Don Seigel is a good example of a workman director. Working in the crime picture since the 50's. In the Trailers From Hell review for this, one of the commentators ays he tries to teach his screenwriting students is you want to tell a story that going forward is continuously suprising and the going backwards seemed inevitable. Charley Varrick pulls it off with a perfect tempo. Could this be my favorite Matthau performance? It just might be. 

17. The Hourglass Sanatorium

Adapted from Polish-Jewish born writer Bruno Schulz's book of short stories, Wojciech Has gives a phantasmagoric look at the collective trauma of the Holocaust. If you like Zulawski's films, Has is the next Polish director to seek out. 

18. The Obscene Mirror/Female Vampire/Eugenie de Sade/A Virgin Among the Living Dead

1973 was an outstanding year for Jess Franco. He was still cranking out around 5 movies per year. A prolific streak of output only seen by directors during the studio days of the 30s and 40s. 

David Lynch has seen The Obscene Mirror. I'm 100% sure of it. If you want a different flavor of Franco, one that deviates from his usual sexploitation fare, check this one out. It's his most psychologically complex and haunting work. It's also a case of defense against people who say Jess wasn't a serious director. Emma Cohen delivers delivers a hell of a performance. 

Drenched in fog and desire, Female Vampire shows Franco's camera (with all of it's zooms) lapping up the beauty that is Romay. Sheer vampire ecstasy. There are two camps in the realm of Jess Franco: Soledad Miranda or Lina Romay. This film best exemplifies Romay. 

Eugenie de Sade is the first of Jess Franco's film without the producer Harry Alan Towers. It's an excision of all the macabre filth of Franco put onto film. Though shot in 1970, it didn't get released until 1973. It was his first of a handful of pictures with the stunningly gorgeous Soledad Miranda. 

Any legitimate list of great serial killer films should have this on it. 

A Virgin Among the Living Dead is mainling Franco. Pure poetic incomprehensibility. Shot at a gorgeous Portugese castle with a Bruno Nicolai score. It's one his better realized dream state movies. 

19. The Friends of Eddie Coyle

Adapted from the George V. Higgins crime classic of the same name, Peter Yates' film is as unsparing in sentiment as the book is in syntax. In addition to the harshness, Mitchum turns in a late career performance that ranks with some of his finest. 

20. Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable

There's not a weak entry in the Female Prisoner Scorpion series. But if I were to rank them, #701 would be number one with this one not too far behind. It's not as hellish as the first two. Instead it slows down and takes on a more reflective, sadder vibe. Which is exactly what you want in a film series. To zig instead of zag. My favorite Meiko Kaji performance. 

21. Mean Streets

After Boxcar Bertha, John Cassavetes told Scorsese "Marty, you've just spent a whole year of your life making a piece of shit. It's a good picture, but you're better than the people who make this kind of movie. Don't get hooked in the exploitation market, just try and do something different."

With this advice, Scorsese made his most personal work up to that point. According to Scorsese it's an attempt to put himself and the people he grew up with on the screen. 

Scorsese's work in the 70's doesn't quite reach the stylistic highs of his 90's work or even his 80's work. He's still figuring his shit out. Ever since his first feature in 1967, his films have focused on religion, crime, saints and sinners. While Who's That Knocking can be considered the blueprint for these themes, Mean Streets was where he managed to perfect the synthesis of them moving forward. 

Violence can erupt at any moment and it does. In pool halls, bars, apartment hallways, and the streets. These violent flare ups die down as quickly as they start up. Yet there is a fatalism to them that hangs in the air. We're not quite at the moment of pulling out a gun at a card game and murdering someone after a rude remark. But we're close. Last I heard, Johnny Boy was on the roof, shooting into the air. 

22. Badlands

Malick is a strange director for me. Around college I loved the philosophical and spiritual direction he was going in. Now I've gone more and more for his straightforward movies before he went into hiding. The spiritual stuff has been done better and with less whispering voiceover anyway. 

23. High Plains Drifter

I'm not particularly fond of Clint as a director. His one shot method doesn't produce the same exciting spontaneity of say, a Soderbergh. It's more about getting to the next shot. Mystic River and this film are the exception and I can attribute this to the writing. They are the two examples of how he is a lot darker than people give him credit for. 

24. The Spirit of the Beehive 

This film feels like a Guillermo Del Toro movie before Del Toro. You can find a blueprint for all of his themes in this film: childhood set against harsh historical events, examining the meaning of death and loss, fantasy vs. reality. 

25. The Day of the Jackal

I saw the Bruce Willis remake before this. Not a highlight in the career of Willis but there are some good parts here and there. Enough to make me track down the original. 

While enjoyable, there's a cold and clinical logic to watching this criminal and his methodology in attempting to assassinate Charles De Gaulle. You can tell director Fred Zinneman studied his Pontecorvo and Costa Gravas and made an admirable effort at a political thriller. 

26. The Candy Snatchers

Would be on the syllabus for anyone interested in wanting to know what 70's exploitation is all about. It can be fun on one hand (see: Coffy) or it can be relentlessly bleak. What makes this film work is how it starts out as a movie that appears to be silly only to turn into one where you care. Only by that time, it's got it's claws in so deep you can't look away. A far richer film than Wes Craven's exploitation efforts during this time. It's better made too, with an ending that is a gut punch. 

27. Malatesta's Carnival of Blood

A movie made to be watched at midnight and no earlier. Would be perfect during a 24 horror marathon in the 2 am slot. When you are in a daze and running on coffee. 

Regional horror in the 70's is so fascinating that a book could be written on it. In fact, one has! Stephen Thrower's Nightmare USA is the bible for these types of movies and where I first heard about this one. So when Arrow's American Horror Project box was announced and this was included, I jumped at it. Carnivals already offer boatloads of surrealism. Christopher Speth's solo directing credit foregoes all plot and plunges you into psychadelic moods. If you surrender to it, the rewards will be bountiful. 

28. The Iron Rose

What? A Rollin film that doesn't feature vampires?! 

If prowling through a cemetery is your thing, consider checking out this film. If fucking in a cemetery is your thing, go out, and buy this film now!  

29. Ganja and Hess

Vampirism as addiction. What is so cool about the Dracula lore is how malleable it is to create such unique interpretations as Martin, Cronos, and this one. The way Bill Gunn shoots it makes it feel like it's on the threshold between a dream and a nightmare. 

30. The Corruption of Chris Miller

Between 1970 and 1973, a cornucopia of giallos had been produced. It can make your head spin. After watching the essential Bava, Argento, Fulci, Martino and Lenzi ones, you can only dig deeper into Aldo Ray, Massimo Dallamino, Luigi Bazzoni and so forth. Deeper still, there is gold to be unearthed. Chris Miller lies at this point of excavation. Stylish atmosphere, memorable kills and a Charlie Chaplin mask (!) all contribute to this hidden gem. 

31. Torso

Hard not to fall in love with Suzy Kendall in this. Sergio Martino's career was much longer that just 1971 thru 1973, yet he managed to release his best work in that time frame. Torso caps off the incredible run. It's all about the third act here. If you stick with it, you'll be rewarded. 

32. Battles Against Honor and Humanity

Kenji Fukasaku's yakuza cycle of movies, Battles Against Honor of Humanity began with it's self titled entry. 

There's a bunch of films I was unable to get to and remain on my watchlist:

Alabama's Ghost, Bell From Hell, Big Guns, Black Caesar, Candle For the Devil, Count Dracula's Great Love, Emperor of the North, Godmonster of Indian Flats, Gordon's War, High Rise, Lolly- Madonna XXX, The Laughing Policeman, The Mother and the Whore, The Offence, Story of A Cloistered Nun, Walking Tall

Wisconsin Death Trip

Small towns are a setting for a host of horrors. It can be a murderous creature in the form of a clown. A murder in which the wrong person is scapegoated because of their beliefs and/or appearance. What is appealing to me in these stories is that it isn't just an isolated incident. It spreads like wildfire through the entire town. Creating a paranoia or even madness in the residents. 

What happened in Black River Falls during 1890 through 1900 can be considered a horror. The likes of hich were captured in Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip published 50 years ago. 

The pictures in Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip, are from the collection of town photographer Charles Van Shaick. When taken, the pictures, nor the events, were considered to be unique, extraordinary or sensational. Of the 30,000 images Van Shaick produced, an archivist selected 3,000 to preserve. From those, Lesy judged less than 200 to contain sufficient information to answer the questions about the changes at the end of the entury: what dark thing had changed the ordinary doings of ordinary citizens.

There are dozens of articles and newspaper clippings from the time documenting these occurences. The comination of these news aricles alongside these photographs is overpowering. 

"E.Y. Spaulding who ran a dry goods store in Black River Falls "was last week taken with strong symptoms of derangement, a misfortune doubtless superinduced by overwork and anxiety over business matters."

There were suicides. An article saying the wife of Hans Nelson took her own life by cutting her throat. "She had been deranged for some time" Another article about how a farmer's wife did the same to her throat with a pair of sheep shears. The 80 year old mother of an imprisoned man threw herself in front of a train and was cut into 3 pieces. 

Then you had the homicides. A woman who believed devils were out to get her. She took her three children to the nearby lake and drowned them one by one. A young man shot a woman in the face when she refused his marriage proposal. A German farmer starves his livestock and then blames it on the witches who were after him. A 10 year old boy is sentenced to jail after he and his brother sho a farmer, kept it a secret, and spent all summer treating the farm like their castle. 

People suffered from bad accidents. A man accidentally unhinged his false teeth when chewing a piece of steak, then swallowed them whole. His doctor couldn't get them back up so he had to poke them down. A Mr. M.H. Young came home with a bottle of whiskey, which he set down next to his bottle of carbolic acid, when he reached for one of them in the dark, he got the other and was said to live only 4 minutes after ingesting the acid. 

"A woman was recently found wandering about the streets of Eau Claire with a dead baby in her arms. She was from Chippewa County and had lost her husband and was destitute."

Arson and death from diptheria are prominent, reoccuring items in these accounts. The starkest of images and accounts come from the epidemic of diptheria plaguing children. Lesy manages to construct all of this morbid history into a collage. What he is after almost suggest a spiritual crisis. We have this false nostalgia for the good old America Heartland and this book is a corrective to that nostalgia. Casting a dark shadow over what people think were simpler times. 

The book has gone onto influence several writers. Stewart O'Nan's A Prayer For Dying uses it as the basis for it's story. Cormac McCarthy's last book Stella Maris takes place in a mental institution in Black River Falls. McCarthy is known to have championed the book before. It has even gone on to be turned into a documentary.

These strange things happen all the time, you might say. History, as it seems, had concentrated so much of these occurences on the town of Black River Falls in 1890. A review of the book from a 1973 newspaper by William Gass reports "But it is poetry all the same. A construction. For couldn't we put together our own death trip of any batch of local papers. It would be a different ratio of deaths due to X rather than Y to be sure. A difference which is vital. But the total picture might be equally grim or with the right sheers made to seem so anywhere. Perhaps human misery can neither be created nor destroyed. Merely transformed, distributed and endured."

 

the HALLOWEEN MOVIES ranked, pt. 2: See Anything You Like?

   

7. Halloween II

  Rick Rosenthal manages to swipe the atmosphere of the original and somehow get away with it, albeit it's still obvious that it's on loan. It's as goofy as it is woozy and I used to think that made it boring but now it just effectively puts me in Laurie's headspace as they mine some great tension from her shambling. It's also a nasty, mean little sequel with--at this point in the franchise--uncharacteristically harsh violence. We also have The Shape in a filthy mask and Michael slashing away with bleeding eyes is great imagery. But the characters? The dialog? The contrived brother/sister twist? The lame Samhain lore? The way Rosenthal kicks the whole movie off by woefully undermining the ending of the original? Blegh. There is some unintentional foreshadowing to Looney Loomis with him rushing poor Ben Tramer to his death - makes me laugh every time. It's better than H20 by virtue of its atmosphere and tension but I don't find myself questioning why Carpenter has disowned it as an "abomination." I don't agree but I won't argue, either.

6. 2007

  This is almost tied with Halloween II but eeks out on top because Rob Zombie offers better direction than Rick Rosenthal and better characters and dialog than drunk John Carpenter (and most of the other writers of these movies). I appreciate how different his... everything is, even with all the armchair psychology. Well, it's different until it isn't. I like that he took time to humanize Micheal and then strip that humanity away. That said, the prequel section is far more compelling than the Remake section but what holds all of that afloat is his attention to character. Laurie is instantly charming but not in a way that stinks of desperation with quippy one-liners; she's outgoing and playful without being overtly repressed. I'm not a fan of Annie and Linda in the '78 original but here they're played and written with far more interiority; even Lindsay Wallace's Mom is given a sliver of character when Annie refers to her as a "lush who's gonna be out all night getting hammered." The Strodes are so wholesome, riding the line of being cutesy but never dipping into saccharine. The same goes for Tommy and Lindsay, their interactions with Annie and Laurie border on flat-out naturalism. But, yeah, that portion where it's a beat-for-beat remake just does. not. work. So, everything original shines while the mimicry couldn't be more obvious. This was never the movie he was meant to make, it was a Weinstein movie that he managed to give more to than it deserved. What he does next is truly his.

5. 2018

  This is a perfectly fine movie though it has its strengths and it has its weaknesses (mostly strengths). There are some baffling choices by David Gordon Green but some are so hilarious that they add to it (Sartain dramatically tossing Michael's mask in the backseat of Hawkins' cruiser) while others are so dumb that they subtract from it (Allison finding her Grandmother's mannequins in the woods, complete with zooms, push-ins, ghostly whispers and creepy laughter[?]). I like the character banter, I love Laurie's public meltdown at dinner, I like Michael killing like a machine, and I love that DGG turned a lot of 'nostalgic' imagery on its head by having Laurie and Michael switch places. And, as much as Sartain is just a plot-device to bring Michael and Laurie together, I still like him as a character; not only does he evoke my favorite Kooky Doctor, ala Part 5, but his 'turn' makes more sense after Ends. This might be the most entertaining, satisfying entry in the franchise with how crowdpleasing the climax is. It's fun and not in an ironic way, for once.

4. Halloween

  The original used to be my all-time favorite Horror Movie and then my all-time favorite Slasher and then my all-time favorite Halloween movie but, over the decades, it's wilted for me in every one of those categories. I can't stand Nancy Kyes' acting nor the dialog between her, Laurie, and Linda. It's not just garden-variety bad dialog, it's bad characterization that makes the pacing kind of a slog, with exception to the time we cut to Loomis and Brackett. The last act--while tense--is a bit tedious, too, with Laurie having multiple scenes with Michael where the repetition just annoys more than scares. But it's still effectively chilly, atmospheric, suspenseful, and creepy in spite of all of its glaring flaws. Carpenter, Cundey, Pleasance, Castle, Curtis, and Wallace made magic amidst all the filler. And that ending: one of the best endings to any movie ever, no matter the category.

3. Season Of The Witch

  My favorite part of Halloween III is Dr. Daniel Challis: a terminally boozy, slutty amateur detective devoid of charm or charisma that isn't slick. He's like if your Dad decided he wanted to be like James Bond. This dude would rather do anything than spend time with his kids or see his ex-Wife so he flings himself headfirst into a murder mystery (with the explicit desire to fuck his dead patient's daughter).

This isn't a cosmic horror movie, it's a coming-of-middle age comedy akin to The Weather Man or American Beauty - it just so happens to be about child-killing Irish doomsday cultists. Everyone talks about how bleak the ending is and why (for good reason, because it's apocalyptic and cruel) but it's kind of funny, too, in its irony: Challis ignores his kids to investigate this murder and ends up fruitless in his effort to stop the mass genocide of children. If he'd never gone and investigated this in the first place, he probably could have saved his children's lives or, at the very least, spent the smallest amount of time with them before they perished. Everything to do with this case reminds him of his kids and he hates it. It's not a coincidence that the most horrific scene in the movie is him being forced to watch a whole domestic family (Mother, Father, Child) be killed in a simulation of a living room. And at the end he has to kill the woman he's been fucking who's now just a robot serving limited functions. There's also that great scene where he and Ellie sneak by the scientists by walking a cart beside them: a Scooby-Doo maneuver in a scene of tension; All these years this movie never totally worked for me because I was looking for scares. Watching it now, laughing my ass off, it makes for one Hell of a dark comedy.

2. Ends

  I always wondered why David Gordon Green and his writers had Corey kinda break the 4th Wall in that shot with Jeremy's parents to say "It's Halloween...we're gonna have a good time tonight." I get it now: in these movies anytime someone says "it's Halloween--" it's usually followed up with "--everyone's entitled to one good scare," so it's almost like Green is telling us to curb expectations. And I'm not pinning a medal on it simply for doing something different, because I genuinely love this movie for many reasons, but a big part of its appeal is how fresh it feels. If Halloween Kills was messy and destructive, then this was a thoughtful rebuild; a somber character study of Michael Myers' protege? That's cool as fuck and they nail the landing. The title, 'HALLOWEEN ENDS,' has already been rendered futile by Miramax announcing another reboot [less than a year after this movie's release] but it's still a satisfying conclusion for me, one that raised the bar significantly.

1. H2 (Director's Cut)

  In 2009, before we got a decade+ of artsy horror movies about Trauma, Rob Zombie gave us the best one with his cut of Halloween II. It's the most immersive, textured, effusive, gruelling, brutal, and intoxicating entry in the franchise - featuring a hulking, "pants-shittingly scary" Michael Myers and Laurie Strode at her most Laura Palmer (it's no wonder the cult of fans who adore this movie call it Halloween: Fire Walk With Me).

What happens to a Final Girl after she survives-the-night? Instead of the stale stalk-and-slash that this franchise is known for, Zombie opts for a spiraling nightmare odyssey of PTSD. Scout Taylor-Compton's performance is harrowing and miserable, diving headfirst into waters Jamie Lee Curtis' Lauries only waded waist-deep. It's also an absolute banquet of visual sustenance with richly tactile grime, splashes of color, and harsh spotlights with piercing rays - all shot on film. What I love most about Rob Zombie's whole approach to horror is how he understands pain, both physical and emotional. When characters get hurt in his movies: they hurt. He lingers on pain and dying not in a sadistic way but because his characters are all absolutely real to him, so he treats their pain as such; Annie's death is agonizing because of how shocking it feels, how obscured it is, and because of Brad Dourif's Oscar-worthy reaction to it. Because of every bit of this and more, I fucking adore this movie, even if it's a hard watch to sit through - which is why I only watch it once a year.

Keeping things under wraps

Nobody's ever gotten it right. 

In the 90's, we were getting to see the Universal Monsters reimagined with big name directors at the helm. Francis Ford Coppola did Bram Stoker's Dracula. Kenneth Branagh did Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Mike Nichols did Wolf. Stephen Sommers did The Mummy. Carpenter would take on The Invisible Man in 1991 and Verhoeven would make Hollow Man in 2000. The Creature was glaringly absent. 

Dracula has had a rich history over the decades. We've seen them as traveling nomads, eternal beings who contemplate their immortality and glittering high school students. Hammer, Jean Rollin, Jess Franco, Francis Ford Coppola, Katherine Bigelow, George Romero, Tony Scott, Jim Jarmusch have all took a crack at it. Many brushes have been used to paint many mythologies. The vampire mythos is still being bled dry and sees no signs of stopping. 

Frankenstein's monster is a story that could be interpreted as a fairytale. Tim Burton did so in 1990 with Edward Scissorhands when he married it with suburban Americana. Mel Brooks took the comedy route and created another winning concoction of the story. Proving how malleable Mary Shelley's text can be when it comes to genre. 

Then we have The Wolf Man. Werewolves have been used as a metaphor for female puberty in Ginger Snaps. Neil Marshall used the action genre and funnels in werewolves with Dog Soldiers. Angela Carter's gothic fairytale take on the wolves in her classic 1979 work The Bloody Chamber was adapted by Neil Jordan when he made The Company of Wolves. 

All three of these creatures have a diverse mythology which allows them to become a part of multiple genres and subgenres. We are then left with the other tier: The Invisible Man, the Mummy and the Creature From the Black Lagoon.

The original 1933 James Whale film of The Invisible Man is among the best of that whole group of classics. Certainly better than Dracula or The Wolf Man. I'm not a huge fan of The Creature. The original is good but it didn't want me to see more iterations of it. The mythology is self contained within the space of one film. It's a humanoid monster that attacks people. Nothing really interesting was done with it until Guillermo Del Toro took on the story in 2017's The Shape of Water. 

This preamble allows us to finally open the sarcophagus and take a look at what this is all about: the mummy. 

If I ever made a horror film, this would be the first subject I'd tackle. The argument against a proper mummy movie would probably sound like this: It's basically a lumbering zombie with bandages wrapped around it. I blame it more and the near absence of an effective film. When it does show up, I'm left with the feeling of disappointment. 

It all began with Universal's 1932 film. Director Karl Freund employs techniques Val Lewton would use a decade later. The power of suggestion through sound and shadow. During the time of pre code horror, directors often used the influence of German expressionism on their films. Karl Freund was a direct link to this influence, having worked as a cameraman on Friz Lang's Metropolis and FW Murnaus's The Last Laugh. There is a creepy, effective sequence in which we watch the mummy coming to life and moving his hand as a character is reading Egyptian text. Summoning it from it's eternal sleep. The Jack Pierce makeup effects called for Boris Karloff to be wrapped up in bandages. His skin resilience from this film alone had to have been tremendous. The entire movie hinges on these effects and Karloff. The love story over centuries of time narrative doesn't do much for me and was done so much better by Coppola in his take on Dracula. 

Hammer Studios gave it a shot in 1959. Paul Naschy wrestled it to the ground in The Mummy's Revenge. At the tail end of the 90's we were given The Mummy. Or as I like to call it Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Mummy's Tomb. There are certain aspects of it I enjoy. The scarabs that burrow underneath the skin for one. Brendan Fraser's comedic timing for another. When I saw it in the theater in 1999 I left underwhelmed. I had seen an enjoyable adventure movie. But it used the material of what could be an effective horror movie as a vehicle.  

Future sequels would be made. None of which grabbed my attention. By the time 2017 rolled around, Universal dusted off the rights and made an updated installment. This time with Tom Cruise. Yet again, it was an action adventure movie. Expecting Universal to do something unique with this property was naive at this point. 

No, the places I would find the closest representation of the bandaged cadaver were scarce but gave me hope that something could be done. There are three examples I have come across.

The opening of Nosferatu the Vampyre is exactly the type of mood this hypothetical mummy movie calls for. I'd say it's in contention for creepiest opening to any horror movie. The Popol Vuh score overlaying mummies frozen in a state of shock all the while we hear a sound of a slow, flapping wing. The rhythm imitating that of a heartbeat.  

In the fifth season of Tales From the Crypt, Creep Course. Some of the more disturbing elements of Egyptian mythology are used. A tool used to pull the brain out from the nose. Another being a drink that liquifies the insides and has them ooze out of your anus and mouth. Both methods sick and twisted. Both sign posts pointing me to a giant sign saying "How the hell are you horror directors missing the potential here?" 

Finally, we have my favorite story from Tales From the Darkside: The Movie. Lot 249. The closest anyone has come. It brings the mummy out into the modern world. Only what is built around it isn't as hokey as some of the other 'modern takes'.

Outside of film, the death metal band Nile has offered plenty of inspiration through the Egyptology themed lyrics and instrumentation. Lead singer Karl Sanders' being a huge nerd for this and Lovecraft helps a great amount. Albums like In Their Darkened Shrins, Annihilation of the Wicked and Ithyphallic remain in heavy rotation for inspiration. A dream mummy project would probably involve Karl Sanders scoring it.

These are mere pieces of a puzzle with the rest of them missing. When I sit down and watch a horror movie with potential to be great and the movie doesn't utilize said potential, the first thing I say to myself is "well here's what I would've done." With The Mummy, maybe I'll just go full bore and write my own script or book. 

A SpookShow guide

The Exorcist: Believer was released a few days ago to a giant wet fart of a reception. Instead of wading through the excrement of recently released horror flicks, I decided to look back 50 years to when my favorite horror film, The Exorcist, was released. There's enough to do a top 20 on horror alone from this year. As such, I've been focusing on 60s and 70s with some darts thrown at the the 80s and 90s. 

Having been asked what I'm watching this season, I compiled a watchlist of movies I've never seen. It's the same watchlist I went to last year but with a bunch of titles added.  

Classic

The Golem (1920)

A Page of Madness (1926)

The Unknown (1927)

Isle of the Dead (1943)

The Ghost of Yatsuya (1959)

Blood and Roses (1960)

Mr. Sardonicus (1961)

Dementia 13 (1963)

The Haunted Palace (1963)

The Man With X Ray Eyes (1963)

The Raven (1963)

Castle of Blood (1964)

Color Me Blood Red (1965)

Planet of the Vampires (1965)

This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse (1967)

Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell (1968)

The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch (1968)

Whistle and I'll Come to You (1968)

Blind Beast (1969)

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969)

70s

Bacchanale (1970)

Bloodthirsty Butchers (1970)

The Body Beneath (1970)

Cry of the Banshee (1970)

Equinox (1970)

The Nude Vampire (1970)

The Vampire Doll (1970)

The Brotherhood of Satan (1971)

The Devil's Nightmare (1971)

Hands of the Ripper (1971)

The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (1971)

See No Evil (1971)

The Werewolf Vs. the Vampire Woman (1971)

Murder Mansion (1972)

The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! (1972)

Season of the Witch (1972)

Alabama's Ghost (1973)

Bell From Hell (1973)

Blood Ceremony aka The Legend of Blood Castle (1973)

Candle For the Devil (1973)

A Cold Night's Death (1973)

Count Dracula's Great Love (1973)

The Crazies (1973)

Godmonster of Indian Flats (1973)

Night of Fear (1973)

Scream Blacula Scream (1973)

Wicked, Wicked (1973)

Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll (1974)

Evil of Dracula (1974)

Flavia the Heretic (1974)

Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell (1974)

Bug (1975)

Eyeball (1975)

Lips of Blood (1975)

The Possessed (1975)

Psychic Killer (1975)

Wolf Guy (1975)

Beatriz (1976)

J.D.'s Revenge (1976)

Through the Looking Glass (1976)

Curse (1977)

The Haunting of Julia (1977)

Prey (1977)

It Lives Again (1978)

The Butterfly Murders (1979)

The Devil Incarnate (1979)

Savage Weekend (1979)

80s

The Hearse (1980)

The Night of the Hunted (1980)

We're Going to Eat You (1980)

Without Warning (1980)

The Appointment (1981)

Bewitched (1981)

Don't Go In the Woods (1981)

Frightmare (1981)

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne (1981)

Venom (1981)

Wolfen (1981)

The Black Room (1982)

Hell Has No Boundary (1982)

Mansion of the Living Dead (1982)

Secta Siniestra (1982)

The Slayer (1982)

Superstition (1982)

Devil Fetus (1983)

The Devonsville Terror (1983)

Mortuary (1983)

A Night to Dismember (1983)

Red Spell Spells Red (1983)

Night Has A Thousand Desires (1984)

Evils of the Night (1985)

Horror House On Highway 5 (1985)

Abracadabra (1986)

Body Count (1986)

Breeders (1986)

Crawlspace (1986)

Devil Story (1986)

Evil Laugh (1986)

Gothic (1986)

Link (1986)

Trick Or Treat (1986)

Blood Diner (1987)

It's Alive III: Island of the Alive (1987)

Killing Spree (1987)

The Kindred (1987)

A Return to Salem's Lot (1987)

Blood Delirium (1988)

Celluloid Nightmares (1988)

Door (1988)

Lady In White (1988)

Paperhouse (1988)

Spider Labyrinth (1988)

The Undertaker (1988)

Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge (1989)

90s

Alienator (1990)

Lisa (1990)

Pale Blood (1990)

The Boneyard (1991)

Highway to Hell (1991)

Darkness (1993)

Doppleganger (1993)

Jack Be Nimble (1993)

Necronomicon (1993)

Run and Kill (1993)

Angel Dust (1994)

Creatures From the Abyss (1994)

Red to Kill (1994)

Habit (1995)

Haunted School (1995)

Night of the Scarecrow (1995)

Splatter Naked Blood (1996)

Thesis (1996)

Thinner (1996)

Office Killer (1997)

Bio Zombie (1998)

Memento Mori (1999)

Stir of Echoes (1999)

00s

Dagon (2001)

Sleepless (2001)

Haze (2005)

The Burrowers (2008)

10s

Kotoko (2011)

The American Scream (2012)

Fish and Cat (2013)

As Above, So Below (2014)

Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016)

Dachra (2018)

Luz (2018)

20s

The Last Matinee (2020)

Dark Glasses (2022)

Deadstream (2022)

Skinamarink (2022)

V/H/S/85 (2023)

the HALLOWEEN MOVIES ranked, pt. 1: Dangertainment

#13. Curse

  Along the broad spectrum of Halloween Franchise variety, Part 6 is tasteless cardboard that's devoid of nutrients. It's tension-free, suspense-free, character-free, gluten-free, low sodium, no carb, low fat, no fun, no sugar, processed Michael Myers food product. The score, the jumpscares, the editing, dialog, ugh...it's all so obnoxious and annoying. Donald Pleasance's presence is the only thing I like. That's how bad it is: Loomis just existing on screen is a comfort. He shows up to walk around what is essentially a Spirit Halloween store with the most cunty staff imaginable. Everyone in it is either paper-thin and forgettable or deeply unlikable - none of them remotely compelling (our Final Girl is WOMAN. Her son is CHILD).

  Paul Rudd is always welcome but he's just bad here - not funny-bad, either. Having Tommy Doyle be a shifty little creep is good on paper but turning him into an exposition machine for celtic mythology is fucking YAWN. There have been some awful origin stories/explanations for horror movie villains (like Leatherface's dumb skin disease in TCM '03) but Cult Of Thorn is quite the abortion of mystique.

  I hate this movie.

#12. Resurrection

  You know it's bad, I know it's bad, I don't need to unpack why for the 297463rd time. So I'm gonna use this slot to defend one major component that gets too much shit: Busta Rhymes' Freddie, with all his one-liners and goofy martial arts, is the only person doing anything remotely fun here.

   Seriously, take him out and you still have an awful movie, which means it can't all be on him (the opening is easily the worst part and Freddie hasn't even clocked in yet). I'd even argue that if you take him out, you'd have a much worse movie (final girl is nobody, 'contestants' are despicable, and Decker is beyond lame). And, c'mon, Freddie having a one-sided argument with Michael, while he's dressed as Michael, is a genuinely funny bit; it's the Spider-Man pointing meme but with Micheal Myerses. I don't ever watch this movie, because I hate it, but I revisited it for this ranking and I lit up every time he was on screen; his description of Michael as "a killer shark in baggy-ass overalls" is poetry.

   As a character in a movie full of god-awful characters, he's the best of the worst.

  "Trick or treat, muthafucka!"

#11. Revenge

  The only reason Part 5 is above Resurrection and Part 6 is because of Dr. Sam "Loonie" Loomis. He is so hilariously unhinged and I love it (I also seriously respect Pleasance for committing to the bit for a fourth time; what a camp champ). ...but it's not all fun.

  There's also Tina, her friends, those circus clown cops, one of big Mike's worst masks, and deficient filmmaking weighing it down. What it severely lacks in atmosphere, scares, good writing, competent editing, performances, sensible direction, or any spookiness whatsoever, is kinda made up for with Loomis' antics. Him knocking kids' masks off, playing "catch" with Jamie as the ball, holding cops at gunpoint, and of course, "Cookie Woman" (which has stuck with me for decades), is all candy to me.

  For most people they love The Room or Troll 2 but Halloween 5 has always been my go-to So Bad It's Good movie. Donald Pleasance hobbled in Halloween 5 so Nic Cage could run in Wicker Man. I enjoy this movie too much to put it any lower.

#10. Return

  Part 4 has its moments and the good ones are carried by some pretty effective atmosphere (but we're still far from Carpenter and Cundey 😢). The absolute best part is right up top: this movie has my favorite opening credits sequence in the franchise. There's no typical Halloween Theme, either. All it is is just a skittering, chilly, gusty ambient drone over the most autumnal October imagery this side of Trick 'r Treat and Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow. I'll throw it on every October but only for the novelty of that picturesque opening and the overall Spooky Szn mood that reverberates from it. It's more of a moving October advent calendar than a movie to me.

  And I'm focusing on all of this because everything else is flatlined: Jamie, Rachel, Grady, Meeker, his Daughter - they're nothing characters with the most benign YA novel dialog. Loomis' scenes are kinda nice, he hasn't completely lost it yet. I like him having a swig and a smile with that kooky priest, it's one of the few times in this franchise where we get to see straight-laced joy on the man's face. I don't know, I don't feel strongly either way. It's north of awful but south of good. It's not funny-bad like 5 nor as offensive as 6 because, after everyone rejected Part III, they played it safe and pandered.

  Some feelings I can muster up: I don't like Myers' mask in this one, it looks goofy, they should have kept the bandaged-up look from the gas station sequence, it's the only time he's remotely creepy. I don't like how the actor plays him, either, he's wooden as fuck. The ending would be cool if 5 didn't squander it. The lynchmob murder of Ted Hollister is amusing but nowhere near as funny as Ben Tramer's death in Part II.

  That's all I got.

#9. Kills

  Whereas Part 6 was pathologically thin, KILLS is carelessly gluttonous. It's just a delicious, disgusting, unhealthy, intoxicating, nauseating, annoying, hilarious fucking mess. Anytime I watch it I come away feeling so dizzy and tired, just like I do after I leave a buffet. It wins out over 4 simply because there are pockets where great side characters are given some sincerely memorable, funny banter and then die in some of the coldest ways across every timeline in this convoluted franchise.

   Seriously, I'd watch a whole Altman-esque hangout movie featuring all the victims in Michael's path (it makes me want to do a whole post ranking the side characters of the DGG Trilogy). I always get invested in the lives of Sondra and her husband, Big John & Little John, and the shitty kids in the Silver Shamrock masks. They're given charming and relatable little details, like the way Sondra's husband gripes about her Mom smoking in his sleep apnea mask, it imbues them with so much interiority and history.

  And the same applies to all the other characters who aren't in the Evil Dies Tonight lynchmob (any complaints I have about that shit has already been said ad nauseum so I'm not gonna bore you; none of it works). Get rid of all the mob violence and shit, get rid of Laurie and Hawkins' sedating monologues, just let us luxuriate with the characters who stayed home...until Michael brutally takes them from us. Cameron's death is downright barbaric and Sondra's husband's death, as she watches helplessly, is unnecessarily tragic and cruelly prolonged. The firefighter sequence, on the other hand, is so fucking fun - The Shape has never been cooler.

  I love the way it's shot, too, with that great POV of Michael stabbing through the gas mask. Another great POV shot is employed later, in one of the franchise's worst sequences (Tarvoli's death) - I despise the writing of that scene but it's so visually exciting, which describes a lot of this movie. Michael slaughtering the mob looks great but Laurie's speculative voiceover about evil, or whatever, just dampens it. Not all of Green's choices pay off, though: there are some nonsensical zooms and that neck-snapping whip-pan to Allyson shouting "WHAT?!" almost reaches Part 5 levels of camp. The sequence where Marion Chambers and the Doctor/Nurse couple die does bring us to full-on camp. But the sequence with Lindsay is legitimately tense? Carpenter's score is fucking amazing, though, but nothing in this movie ever earns it. And the worst sin of the movie is that, aside from Laurie coming to the realization that Michael is mostly indifferent to her (that remains unexplored), our main characters are lateral and redundant. They walk and talk in circles, saying the same shit over and over.

  This movie has everything, for better and worse.

  Mostly worse.

#8. H2O

  H20 came on the heels of Part 6 and was followed by Resurrection, so it's wedged between the series' worst movies. It has the best act to follow and after easily dropping the mic, the next act to pick it up fucking bombs. It's also refreshing, for this list, to have a movie so uncomplicated on the tail of KILLS. It has occasional atmosphere (not enough) because the photography is kinda flat and the score is equally inconsistent; the opening theme is interpolated with an orchestra and it's surprisingly effective. But...sometimes it's downright shrill and derivative? There are patches where they recycle tracks from Scream and it undercuts the tension.

  I like Laurie's new look and life, she's living with PTSD (even though Halloween [2018] does it better) but seems well-adjusted outside of the holiday. Curtis is typically great and the rest of the cast is good to fine (Hartnett, LL Cool J, and Arkin bring more to their characters than what they were given [I hope Ronnie's novel gets published]). The horny teens aren't annoying enough nor charming enough for me to be affected by their deaths one way or another; they die, that's it (the light-bulb decoration kill is neat). The scariest but in the movie is where just the threat of violence is suggested: the rest-stop bathroom scene, with the Mom and her daughter, is very effective. Unfortunately, it happens very early on and I never get close to that feeling again. It's a pretty middling slasher until the ending; the ending is the best! Laurie pulls a Loomis! She takes a cop's gun, orders a paramedic to load Michael's body in the van, drives said van into Michael (after launching him out the windshield) and they both topple off a hillside.

  Finally, she decapitates him with an ax and it's extremely satisfying (fuck the retcon: that's Michael's noggin. Her huge sigh of relief will not be undercut). It's a serviceable movie besides HOLY SHIT THAT CGI MASK WHAT THE FUCK!?

Dr. Satan's Lair

My introduction to Mr. Zombie came through Twisted Metal III. One of the coolest features of both Twisted Metal 3 & 4 wasn't just that it feature Rob's songs, but you could play them in your stereo as music CDs. I would eventually hear Dragula and Living Dead Girl along with it's music video accompaniment via MTV. You know, when they actually played music. It ticked off two boxes for me at the time: heavy metal and horror. The only other band that had that magical concoction for me was Iron Maiden. But this was...modern. And it wasn't downtuned rap rock. 

I can't recall what movie this teaser trailer was attached to. One video rental later, I was reminded of the music video for Dragula. Lots of colors. You could tell right away this was a movie made by a music video director who still hadn't quite found his style. He was a director in a funhouse of all the things that would later characterize his future efforts. Profanity laden dialogue, serial killers, a love of 70's exploitation, his wife. Above all of this though was just how funny the movie was and still is. It's a directorial debut whose opening moments of on screen dialogue consist of a story about a guy getting a Dr. Zeyus doll stuck up his ass.

The comedy would guide me through the Firefly house, through the woods and into a deep dark well of muck and grime leading to catacombs. Wherein, the director would unleash his greatest creation: Quinton Quail a.k.a. Dr. Satan. Captain Spaulding gives a backstory about him as a mad scientiest who worked in an insane asylum. High off the likes of Blair Witch and folklore, the scene tickled my fancy. 

The mechanical arms attached to his own arms and the breathing mask make this thing scary as hell. More than any Firefly. It's up there with the Chatterer cenobite as one of my favorite creature designs. His assistant, the Professor is as menacing a presence. 

The film is at it's weirdest when we get to Dr. Satan's Lair which is saying a lot. We don't see the Doctor in Rob's next film but there is a deleted scene in which he makes him presence known amongst a nurse at a hospital. Rightly so, as it's a character that belongs in House of 1000 Corpses and not Devils Rejects. 

American HERstory X

  It's been two weeks since I first watched Soft & Quiet.

  I've watched about 15 or 20 movies since then but not a day has gone by where I haven't thought about this movie. And I haven't just had passing thoughts: I've dwelled on it and been distracted by it during other movies, having to snap myself out of the trance. So I watched it two more times.

  This is a tremendous movie but part of its power comes from how deliberately suffocating it is. One critic correctly referred to it as "queasy," which...yeah, it's uncomfortable, that's the point. I appreciate how uneasy this movie is to swallow. In the tradition of someone like William Friedkin, director Beth de Araújo goes for it in terms of eventual violence and it's neither tasteless nor tasteful because this isn't a trashy Lifetime movie nor some palatable White Guilt movie - you either have the stomach for it, or you don't. The first time I watched it I certainly didn't and so I couldn't accurately gauge its pacing because the last 40•ish minutes I had to pause it and take breaks. There are frequent racial slurs, antisemitism, infuriating philosophizing, chilling cruelty, sexual assault, emotional and physical torture, and murder to contend with.

   Soft & Quiet was picked up by Blumhouse, the biggest name in theatrical horror distribution, but it quietly dumped S&Q onto VOD, which stinks of corporate cowardice. I get that it's not easily marketable but TikTok word-of-mouth has done the marketing anyway. Again, I'm reminded of Friedkin, specifically how Disney, via Criterion, took the N-word out of The French Connection, which is more racist (and dangerous) than the actual use of the N-word. What they essentially did was more of the same shit that Ron DeSantis and other Anti-CRT chuds have been doing: sanitizing history. French Connection isn't a racist movie, it's a movie about a racist, but Disney committed a cover-up, absolving him by tampering with the evidence - which is the kind of shit that a racist cop would do. Blumhouse should have made more noise for this movie, especially since it's so fucking well-made (and a debut feature no less!!).

   Not only was it filmed in four takes over four days, but each time they had to painstakingly plan out every shot, lighting change, and blocking while never losing momentum or sunlight. We follow them over three car rides and a boat trip all while the cinematographer, Greta Zozula, is lugging the camera on her shoulder and having to keep things visually fresh while racing the setting sun. There's this gorgeous shot late in the movie where a character stands in front of a window and the colors of the dusky cobalt blue sunset gradient in the background, with the interior orange light in the foreground, is incredibly striking. They either planned for that and executed it perfectly or they took advantage of it on the fly - either way it's remarkable. Shortly after there's a shot where two characters are engulfed by brake lights, so it's just this frightening blood-red flood in the frame.

  I have written so much about how gimmicky and lame long takes are now but S&Q does it 1) for the sake of propulsive kinetic energy 2) without any noticeable digital stitching so 3) everything that unfolds is as naked and tense as possible. It serves a narrative and sensory purpose, it's not a masturbatory exercise in style. The home invasion and all the messy violence that spurts out is inescapable because it's never obscured by time-jumps or cushy surrealism via dream logic. The dialog drives everything in real-time and is so expertly woven in.

  As everything falls apart and escalates, the way these characters talk to each other is nonstop development as resentments and interpersonal dynamics open like blisters and some oozing surprises dribble out. The breathless endurance of the performances is exhausting and engrossing, especially Olivia Luccardi's character Lesley (who echoes Fairuza Balk's character from American History X). She's a wildcard of cruelty, opportunism, and cunning manipulation who escalates everything until everyone is hysterically turning on each other (more on her later). Watching the chaos of in-fighting and sloppy ineptitude isn't funny by any means (comedy as a genre might as well be on the moon in this case) but there's a thick air of self-destructive pitifulness; these women aren't just hateful but pathetic and desperate, which makes them scarier. The real-time aspect isn't just about watching them commit their acts of barbarity but showing the cover-up mines a lot of tension too. Not just because, for them, it's the suspense of worrying they're not gonna get away with it. But, for us, it's hopelessly sickening watching them cover their tracks. It's almost like getting a glimpse into the potential night of Tamla Horsford's death, which isn't deliberate at all but it was on my mind for most of the final act.

  The racist banter between these pie-baking wine-Mom Karens and yoga pants-clad Beckies strikes a perfect balance: It could easily be laid on too thick or downplayed to make them 'sympathetic,' but it's never didactic or sanitized. Even with that meticulous care for her script (built by extensive research, cultural osmosis, and traumatic life experience) people refuse to give de Araújo her flowers or, hell, her agency. I'll chalk it up to them being uninformed.

   Most critiques of Soft & Quiet are dismissive and uncharitable: "Why was this made?" and/or "we don't need this, especially for people of color," over and over those sentiments kept popping up. 

  I'm gonna field the question as if it's not rhetorical, "Why was this made?" well, writer/Director Beth de Araújo said this scenario is her worst nightmare - thankfully she lived it through her art rather than in real life. Saying it offers nothing to people of color is nearsighted considering she's a woman of color (Chinese and Brazilian) who, in the wake of asian people being viciously attacked on the street, needed a creative outlet. The director herself is saying "this shit scares me" but her immersive art therapy is rejected as 'unnecessary'?

  Let's put Soft & Quiet up against the polar opposite: Victor Salva, a director convicted for molesting young boys, made Jeepers Creepers 2, a horror movie about young boys who are left helpless at the mercy of a flying, unstoppable monster known as The Creeper. Said Creeper picks off all of the adults and then takes its time choosing young boys to victimize. It couldn't be more sickeningly obvious that this is wish-fulfillment. So we have two horror movies where one is made by someone terrified of her nightmares coming true and the other is made by someone whose wet dreams are nightmarish. And I make that juxtaposition because it's important to unpack authorship; the art is so integral to the specific artist making it. Ever since #MeToo the debate of 'separating the art from the artist' has been exhaustively unpacked but after reading reviews for Soft & Quiet a question no one has asked manifested: does that apply to victims' art as well...?

   Look back a few years: The Handmaid's Tale, The Invisible Man, The Assistant, and Don't Worry Darling, all stories where white women have been centered when it comes to media about power dynamics and abuse. Don't Worry Darling is the bottom of the barrel for many reasons but mainly because its only woman of color is reduced to a plot device and sacrificial negro to propel our white heroine. It's a thankless role but it's just par for the course with White Feminist myopia. Handmaid's Tale is no better: it's hailed as this great Dystopian Feminist show but it just shows white women being treated like black women were during slavery. In fact, the white women are treated worse than the black women on the show, so it truly is science fiction. It's the closest they could get to roleplaying misogynoir without wearing actual Blackface.

  I remember after the very first Women's March in 2017 there were scores of women of color talking about their experiences, about how they didn't feel included, that sentiments about Black Lives Matter or Human Rights Violations at the border were treated with contempt, among others. And the backlash was white women eschewing apologies in favor of saying "we don't need to talk about that," cuz they would rather One Size Fits All than unpack the uncomfortable intricacies of intersectionality. Same thing happened when Roe v. Wade was overturned: women of color wanted to talk about how they had much more difficult times getting the services they needed for abortions, but White Women shot them down with the same condescending "we're all in this together" bullshit. Their tone had the insulting "time-and-place" snark even though the time and place is a continuum.

   I remember back during the George Floyd protests in 2020 there was a growing sentiment bolstered by CNN that "if we're going to reform police, we need to hire more women." It's a level of out-of-touch delusion that's downright staggering. Consider Officer Amber Guyger's home invasion and execution of Botham Jean. Not to mention Officer Lacy Browning responding to a mental wellness check leading to her pressing her foot into Mona Wang's neck, pulling her hair, and dragging her across the floor face-down. There are also the Karens who wield the police as their own personal attack dogs to intimidate people of color (or worse) for barbequing, bird-watching, dog-walking, or just... existing.

 Representation is important and that goes for monsters, too, especially since, for some, portraying something cinematically is more legitimizing than what's on the news or social media.

  Thankfully, Jordan Peele did that with Get Out, and it was specifically 102 years in the making.

  D.W. Griffith's Ku Klux Klan propaganda film, BIRTH OF A NATION, shows a white damsel running from a monstrous black man (played by a white man in blackface) intent to harm her - the Klan show up and 'heroically' save her from this 'Black Devil.' That was 1915 and it kicked off a CENTURY of harmful imagery portraying black men as lustful, violent, white-women-obsessed animals. 102 years later, Get Out finally shows a black man's hands on a white woman's throat and it's not only 100% justified but it's a satisfying, stand-up-and-cheer moment.

  Curiously, though: Chris stops. He looks scared... because this lady is SMILING.

  As it starts to dawn on Rose that she's gonna die, she fucking smiles at Chris and it's an EVIL fucking grin. It's not explicitly spelled out _why_ she smiles but it can be interpreted so many ways. My guess is, from her warped, racist perspective, she's reveling in watching 'his true nature' come out. She's willing to die, out of spite, to 'prove' he's just like the Black Devil from Birth Of A Nation. OR she's imagining Chris going down for her 'murder' because she knows the courts won't believe his fantastical story about racial brain-swapping. Rose knows the marks on her neck will tell the story for her, regardless of the truth - even from the grave she can control the power dynamic. But soon after this, Peele plays with expectations and perspective when we see red and blue police lights. Usually this would mean rescue... in a white horror movie. Chris is logically terrified while Rose typically reaches out for help; she knows a cop will fall for her angelic sham. It's a great moment of tension because Peele makes Chris, and us, sit for an agonizing few seconds because he knows we're thinking about what the cops THINK they saw: a black man on top of a white woman with his hands on her neck - with no context whatsoever. Thankfully, this is a fake-out: it's Rod and he doesn't question Chris' actions once because he's not just Chris' friend, he knows exactly what he saw: self-defense. So in the case of Soft & Quiet, de Araújo centers white women for the very first time not as victims but as monsters, to challenge other media that never questioned white women's complicity in racism and the patriarchy. It's a whole eat•pray•love Book Club of Roses.

   Female White Supremacists are usually balanced out by white female allies (for every racist Bryce Dallas Howard in The Help, there's an Emma Stone to the rescue, her saintly actions silently saying Not All White Women). There's one woman who initially dissents but the other women gently harp on her racial biases and nurture them, after some alcohol and comfort in solidarity it's not long before she hurtles toward full-on hatred.

  There are few male characters but they're included in really subversive ways. The most innocent one being a little boy, no older than 10. He's alone, waiting for his Mom to pick him up from school. Emily, his teacher and the movie's ringleader, is shown early on in despair that she can't have kids, so she takes advantage of the fact that he's alone and lightly grooms him. She instructs him to publicly insult a Latina custodian, shows him a swastika in a pie she's been holding, and tells him about a children's book she's writing (we never see what's in the book but it's not hard to imagine). It's stomach-churning shit.

  There's another moment where the Ladies' first meeting is cut short by a Preacher at the church they've gathered at. He'd heard some of their hateful dreck and doesn't mince words about kicking them out. Emily initially balks in defiance so he deepens his tone and pushes back - she begrudgingly gives in. He made her feel powerless and, coming off the dopamine rushes of grooming her student and indoctrinating the more sheepish woman in her meeting, she hones in on her next target: her husband.

  This is where Emily's character really comes to life, in the worst ways. They're all gearing up to commit a hate crime but he tries to sober them up. And I'm not gonna give him too much credit: he's hesitant purely for the sake of self-preservation. He's just as much a bigot as they are but his vision isn't as clouded as theirs in this moment so he tries to tell them what obvious repercussions are on the horizon. Emily is insulted and disgusted, because he's not willing to participate that somehow makes him "weak". So she uses toxic masculinity to bend him to her will; venomously emasculating him, calling him a "Faggot," and the other women join in with utterances of "man up." He gives in and helps them but he never loses that foresight, even with simmering resentment and panic practically glowing under his skin. The most telling moment is, after they've gotten to the house, they're hiding because their victims come home early. He starts to panic and berate her so Emily viciously slaps him and even denies him his need to cry. Almost like a jumpscare he starts to slap himself over and over, taking out the anger he feels toward her on himself, it's not just startling in the moment but we can glean so much of their history from these few scenes.

  Like, maybe she projects onto him her inability to get pregnant and so it manifests into outright abuse, nitpicking any sign of weakness as confirmation bias, and using that to cut him down and mold him. He's certainly susceptible if the right buttons are pushed but he's also not stupid so he fucks off from the narrative altogether. Emily is left to fend for herself and Lesley is the one to take advantage and extort her. From then on Emily does everything that Lesley barks at her and is brought back to the despair from earlier.

   So much is said on the whole about indoctrination, power dynamics, racism, toxic masculinity, gender politics, and entitlement. Unlike most one-dimensional racist characters who are usually deprived of characterization through subtractive cliches and stereotypes, our hateful leads are layered and compelling without being sympathetic. Not once does it ever half-heartedly preach about racism nor absolve its racists by having them learn some contrived lesson(s). It also doesn't give us any immediate satisfaction in seeing them punished, either. One of the top reviews on Letterboxd complains that we never see them die after all that they've done; Inglourious Basterds this is not. 

  Comeuppance and redemption arcs are both barred at the door because racism isn't solved easily. 

  So, do we "need this"? Well, I can't speak to what anyone else needs but I'll say that, as a culture, we've never been shown a movie like this. So I'll ask: If we don't need this, what's the alternative? Most media that 'challenges' Neo Nazis are usually pretty fucking toothless (Jojo Rabbit) vehicles for self-congratulations. Soft & Quiet has teeth but self-righteous neoliberals don't like being confronted with ideology that makes them uncomfortable. Instead, they opt for being spoonfed reassurances that they're good people and mock individuals rather than understand them, especially when confronted with a mirror like this that isn't designed for virtue signaling sentiment, rather the notion that they're the real villains deep down.

  I hate Misery Porn just as much as the next person but this is a tour of an artist's anxieties, a cinematic coping mechanism, not tragedy-as-cheap-spectacle. If you don't like it based on technical aspects or if it makes you uncomfortable---for whatever reasons---fine, critique it, but don't call into question its 'merit' for existing. If a filmmaker uses their art to heal, more power to them, and [SPOILERS] based on the ending I'm confident that She needed this.

  "In order to empathize with someone’s experience you must be willing to believe them as they see it and not how you imagine their experience to be." – Brené Brown