Halloween Special Edition: 10 Quintessential List + 13 More on Bright Lights

(AKA Horror Hotel)

Even her name, Nan Barlow, evokes her sacrificial position (similarity to John Barleycorn, the symbolic straw man sacrificed at harvest time in lieu of an actual male child as of auld). But what's most important is the swirling black and white fog, sinister shadows, minimalist sets, and the feeling of pre-ordained noir-ish dread (I don't think there's a single outdoor shot - the town with the witches is just a fog-bound soundstage, and all the better for it, especially in the moments of warmth like Nan's refuge in the cozy bookstore. Add Christopher Lee, and a bunch of comeuppance heaped upon the snickering left brained science major boyfriend and you get a favorite of mine. Makes a great double bill with BURN WITCH BURN (an actual line in the film) and/or VOODOO MAN. 

This impressive debut feature from future Lucasfilm writers Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz stars Mariana Hill as Arletty, the emotionally vacant daughter of a disappeared artist (Royal Dano). There's a hushed quality to Messiah of Evil, all the better to hear the waves crashing in the distance. Nobody shouts until they're about to die, usually at the hands of cannibal mobs. A super-chill dandy, Thom (Michael Greer), and his two girlfriends, Laura (Anitra Ford) and Toni (Joy Bang), join Arletty in an attempt to unravel the mysteries afoot in this secluded, unfriendly location, and as Thom busts a move on Arletty, the girlfriends disappear into the ominous blackness. Among the film's more haunting elements: photorealist faces peering through windows and a wall weirdly painted with a full-size escalator. At any moment, this empty house seems as if it could warp into a nightmarish shopping mall—one of many bizarre evocations of a film that cannily mixes Lovecraftian dread with Antonioni-esque alienation. (Slant 10/30/14)



It take a few viewings to really appreciate KILL BABY; it's not as highly regarded as some of Bava's other work, which is probably due to a history of bad prints and title changes. A Victorian Gothic Italian rural villa ghost story, KILL, BABY, KILL's Italian title was OPERAZIONE PAURA! (Operation: Terror!). We don't blame them for changing it, but why make it sound like a giallo spy thriller? The similar sounding film FASTER PUSSYCAT, KILL! KILL came out the previous year, and was a film that set the bar for outre grooviness, but grooviness hadn't even been invented in the BABY's Victorian Age setting. Instead there are beautiful 'old master lighted' bowls of fruit, great wind effects, sedatives ("give her 20 drops") and an array of strange and wonderful women, including an Anna Magnani-ish bruja (Fabienne Dali), a terrified innkeeper's daughter (Micaela Esdra), a stylish and terrified med student named Monica (Erika Blanc), and Melissa Graps, a ghost girl with blonde hair (to tie the film even deeper into RIGHT ONE, she's played by a very spooky boy, Velerio Valeri). She's so weird, like Italy's Victorian era version of THE BAD SEED times the SHINING's murdered twins divided by Norman Bates in "wouldn't hurt a fly" drag.In fact, I've seen this movie five times now and it gets better every time, even when it does put me to sleep. In order for a film to be 'hypnotic' on its fifth viewing, which this certainly was, first it has to first be 'boring' - that's the nature of hypnotism as I've come only recently to realize. Since BABY tells only one story, it's not as relentlessly scary and blackly comic as Bava's 1963 trilogy BLACK SABBATH (Which will have you and your viewing comrades calling each other "Stanka!" for weeks on end). KILL, BABY, KILL can seem padded here and there with repeated shots of bells tolling and gloomy ghost-eye exteriors. Cool scenes of victims returned as undead servants of the evil spirit, foreshadowed all through the first 2/3 of the film never materialize. Did Bava run out of undead make-up? Is that the reason the film is so slow, and yet over so fast? (more)










A personal favorite Halloween perennial, this loose comedic 'adaptation' of Poe's poem has reluctant sorceress Vincent Price longing for his Lenore and Peter Lorre (old and bloated but still hilarious) as the raven, turned that way by Dr. Scarabus (Boris Karloff), who it just so happens killed Price's father and has, as it turns out, stolen Lenore (Hazel Court) - who's still alive (a bit like he stole Lugosi's wife in the 1934Black Cat, another Poe "adaptation"). Soon they're all packed away in a carriage, along with a super young Jack Nicholson as Lorre's son Rexford. It all culminates in a memorable sorcerer duel that's fun for all ages.

The Blu-ray remastering is jaw dropping --as different as beautiful soothing night from shitty gray-ass day; its vast and impressive sets (Corman kept all the sets from past Poe films and by the time of The Raven he'd assembled them all into a vast sprawling Gothic maze) always looked kind of brownish and washed out but now every flicker of the big fire pit is a poem; once the gang enter Scarabus's castle the HD transfer begins to shimmer and glow in a new hauntingly lovely greenish gold reflective light and inward depth. The Les Baxter score at times errs on the side of the smugness and helicopter overbearance; but this is pure uncut Halloween delight, so might as well bring the kids by which I mean depressed lovelorn sophomores reeling from too much bad acid too soon in life, catching this at the Student Union and needing to return to the Gothic chambers of childhood, wherein every fairy tale was grim... and all the more comforting for it. (Mephisto from Missourri - 10/14) (est. times seen: 10, since 1975)



At 5:30 the scare engine heats up even further with the Spanish-British horror union of Horror Express (1972), which was long a favorite back in the day, with an alien whose glowing red eyes carry imprints of things it had seen such as a book about dinosaurs, and Telly Savalas as a Cossack who comes barging onto the train at the worst possible time. Christopher Lee is the surly scholar and Peter Cushing is the Sherlock Holmes-ish hero — they’re a great couple, and the train with all its Victorian furnishings and International coziness, is terrific. The film barrels along with nary a dull moment and the kind of crazyAncient Aliens-style storyline that doesn’t insult the intelligence even while blowing the mind and causing chortles over the cheap effects in spots.



I've seen fire and I've seen rain, and I've seen SUSPIRIA enough times to not even mention it here - but PHENOMENA is a perennial because it's got Jennifer Connelly in the dark mirror twin role to her LABYRINTH wanderer (made the following year).

'Care and attention has obviously been paid and if you can move into the frame of mind of being at a near-deserted drive in in the middle of nowhere you will dig the spook show surrealism and great wind noises. It takes all the hot topics of the early 1980s/late 1970s and mashes em up real nice with Argento's bizaarro-Italiano seasoning: chimps avenging their slain masters ala his paisan George Romero's MONKEYSHINES; THE SWARM-style bug attacks; CARRIE-esque telekenetic revenge against bratty schoolmates (replete with wind blowing the hair back ala FIRESTARTER); deformed Jason-like freaks, flaming lakes, a razor left in a trash can for the chimp to find); beheadings, maggots, POV killers shots with a knife on a pole ala PEEPING TOM, etc., all scenically filmed around the base of the Alps, where it's nice and stark and windy, in what wheelchair-bound Donald Pleasance dryly refers to as "the Transylvania of Switzerland."

People have written bad things about Connelly's acting, i.e. her blank expressions when she should be scared. There she goes, walking around in killer's houses with an expression as if she's asleep. Well that's the point, genius! She's a sleepwalker! It's in the plot, somewhere, I think. Anyway, go with it. When in doubt presume everyone in a foreign film has amnesia, you're guaranteed a good time. PHENOMENA works best, as its fans note, as a fairy tale, with Connelly's power to attract bugs perhaps the key to her fearlessness. She's like a superhero, hence the killer's question, "why don't you call your insects?" when she's about to be decapitated."(more)



For my money this is the best lycanthrope study since WEREWOLF OF LONDON (1934), the one with Henry Hull and Warner Oland fighting over a Tibetan flower, not the one with David Naughton arguing with a decomposing Griffin Dunne in a Piccadilly cinema. Maybe I just don't care much for werewolves that get hung up on the letter of the law, like Landis' AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, which came out the same year as HOWLING and there was much to-do in the press at the time about which make-up artist did the better transformation. Rick Baker is a genius, sure, but he and Landis makes Naughton's transformation unbearably agonizing, the moon inescapable, the beast itself a real wolf puppet on all fours--he takes it all way too literally. Joe Dante and Rob Bottin on the other hand know it's a goddamn metaphor so don't get hung up on the 'real' parameters. The HOWLING wolves move way beyond such hang ups, looming tall like monster gargoyles. Following in the shoes of Dante's patron saint, Roger Corman, HOWLING taps into the lupine side of 1970s sexual swinger and EST-ish energy, it's funny and scary and trashy and witty all at once, and then adds De Palma meta-refraction and audio mimesis procedural delirium, Carpenter ominousness, Cronenbergian clinical immediacy, and a plethora of great bit roles by folks like Dick Miller, John Sayles, Kenneth Tobey, Slim Pickens, Kevin McCarthy, Forry Ackerman, and Corman himself..
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That's it. I have to go throw candy at trick-or-treaters up and down 7th Ave from my 4th floor window.