Review: 'Classic Monsters, Modern Art'

When I took my wife to see The Bride of Frankenstein at NY's Museum of Modern Art on one of our first dates, the one thing she commented on after seeing it for the first time was how "iconic" every frame of it is. It may not be as lauded as Citizen Kane, but Kane doesn't have an image half as indelible as Karloff's monster lumbering through a crypt or Lanchester's Bride shrieking in horror when she first meets him. As far as I'm concerned, the horror of the unseen (see The Haunting or The Blair Witch Project) will always be scariest, but the monsters, crypts, and graveyards of less frightening films will never fail to scratch the itchy shoulders of those like me who look forward to Halloween more than Christmas.

Review: 'Ghost of an Idea: Hauntology, Folk Horror and the Spectre of Nostalgia'

As a place for me to babble about my favorite rock music and horror movies of a century that only exists in the rearview, Psychobabble is nostalgic by definition. So a book like Ghost of an Idea, which ostensibly studies and derides the tendency of the horror film to look back with both fear and longing, probably isn't aimed at me. Nor is the almost willfully dense academic voice that dominates the first third of the book. 

Review: 'Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew up the Big Screen'

Defining any year as the “best ever” for movies can’t come off as anything but hyperbolic, and you’d be right to be wary of a book called Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew up the Big Screen when there’s a picture of Jar Jar Binks on its cover. Yet hyperbole or even making a case for all-time-greatness status is not the point of Brian Raftery’s new book. Best. Movie. Year. Ever.is a zippy history of a year in which films may not have always been great but very often blasted off into bold new directions. As awful as The Phantom Menace was, you cannot argue that it wasn’t a prescient indicator of the kinds of movies that currently dominate cinemas. Several that year were equally prophetic, as The Matrix predicted the Internet’s mass-mesmerism, Election put its finger on how much of a sloppy mess the political process was about to become, Run Lola Run solidified the influence video games continue to wield over cinema, and The Blair Witch Project introduced the inescapable found-footage genre.

Diary of the Dead 2018: Week 4

I’m logging my Monster Movie Month © viewing with ultra-mini reviews at the end of every week this October. I write it. You read it. No one needs to get hurt.

October 19

Captain Kronos—Vampire Hunter (1974- dir. Brian Clemens) ****

At a time when Hammer was doubling down on its exploitative rep, the studio produced this comparatively light-hearted romp in which a swashbuckler trots across the countryside looking for vampires to stab. Captain Kronos—Vampire Hunter may be Hammer’s freshest film of the seventies. James Needs’s editing is very stylish (a pub swordfight is pricelessly executed), and Horst Janson is reasonably appealing as the vamp slayer (though his penchant for violent sex is a gratuitous capitulation to the era’s nastier ethos). Caroline Munro and John Cater as Kronos’s more personable sidekicks are better. It’s too bad this did not lead to the series it was intended to because it would have been great fun to watch this dynamic trio swashbuckle their way through other adventures.

Blair Witch (2016- dir. Adam Wingard) **

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 20

The Date: October 20

The Movie: The Blair Witch Project (1999)

What Is It?: The movie that sparked the found-footage horror craze is either the scariest movie ever made or the biggest con in the world. I believe the former. The very legitimately frightened cast ooze all that fear onto the screen, and there are several unbearably terrifying scare scenes. But even shots as mundane as a bunch of sticks dangling from trees and a guy standing in a corner are absolutely terrifying.

Why Today?: On this day in 1994, the three film students began the trip from which they’d never return. Only their footage remains.

Correction: Due to a sloppy screw up on my part, I entered the wrong film for yesterday's installment of 366 Days at the Drive-In. So that film has been changed and yesterday's incorrect movie is piggybacking on today's selection:

The Date: October 20

The Movie: Dracula (1931)

What Is It?: Don’t listen to the critics—this is the greatest vampire movie ever made, and every subsequent Dracula movie is inadequate because it doesn’t star Bela Lugosi. And let's not forget Dwight Frye, who nearly heists the film with his crazed yet human portrayal of Renfield. No wonder so many Dracula adaptations did away with the character...who could follow Frye? Lugosi's iconic performance probably would have caused filmmakers to do away with Dracula too if the dude's name wasn't the title of the movie.

Why Today?: On this day in 1882, Bela Lugosi is born.

Review: 'The Blair Witch Project (Devil’s Advocates)'

As much as I love film, I often don’t care very much about how films are made. In certain cases, I actively don’t want to know for fear their illusions will crumble (there are things I’ve learned about 2001: A Space Odyssey I wished I hadn’t). As it is in so many circumstances, The Blair Witch Project is an exception. It casts a spell of realism no making-of account can break, and there is nearly as much creepy atmosphere in the behind-the-scenes machinations as there is on the screen. Heather, Mike, and Josh weren’t just playing the roles of scared, hungry, weary, irritable souls adrift in the woods; they really lived those roles over the course of the film’s seven-day shoot. I also believe that analysis is particularly necessary when dealing with Blair Witch because so many viewers don’t get why it wields such power over other viewers. Such analysis is pretty unnecessary when it comes to a film like The Exorcist. There’s a terrifying-looking little girl doing terrifying and unspeakable things under the sway of Satan. There is nothing remotely so explicit in Blair Witch. For the film’s numerous detractors, there’s nothing in it at all. We never see a witch. We never see anyone do anything more horrible than bickering or confessing to kicking a map into a creek. A film of such ambiguity is destined to leave a lot of people cold, and even though they probably won’t do a turnaround after reading an explanation of why other people think it’s scary, they might still want to understand why.

This is all to explain why The Blair Witch Project is such a necessary installment of the Devil’s Advocates horror film studies series. Author Peter Turner does justice to the film by covering as many of the necessary points as he can in the slim page count the strictures of this mini-book series allowed him. He traces the origins of its unique storytelling device further back than the usual Cannibal Holocaust starting point, going back to epistolary Gothic novels, Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds broadcast, and the first-person pov noir Lady in the Lake. Then he spends the majority of his pages on the making of and analysis. For fans of the film, the latter will be fairly self-evident: Blair Witch draws its powers from the fear of the unknown and the empathy its first-person camera perspectives create. More intriguingly, Turner also gets into how the film contrasts the more typical misogyny of slasher films yet is still guilty of that crime in other ways and how the cameras’ constant presence both increases and decreases the illusion of reality.

The most common problem with mini-books like this is the author either has trouble filling the pages discussing such a limited topic or fails to cover that topic when so few pages are at his/her disposal. I could have read another 200 pages on how The Blair Witch Project was made, and I think there is a great book on that subject still waiting to be written, but Turner still manages to make excellent use of his 83, allotting enough space for the film’s unique origins, creation, meaning, marketing, and legacy to satisfy.

Being Smart on Halloween: A Monster Movie Guide

If you’re too old for trick-or-treating or too clever to actually throw your Halloween party on Halloween (so rarely it falls on a weekend night, and who wants to get blitzed on Tuesday and have to drag themselves to work Wednesday morning?) you might spend October 31^st doing what I do: cramming as many horror movies into 24 hours as you can. But what to choose? What to choose? One wrong selection and— Ka-POW!—the entire atmosphere of this most atmospheric of holidays shoots right down the crapper, leaving you holding your head in anguish and weeping, “Why, oh why did I ever put Leprechaun: Back 2 tha Hood into the DVD player?” That would be pretty stupid. So here’s some Halloween-movie-selecting advice that will make you smart.

Obviously, a film set on or around Halloween is the perfect choice, though these are shockingly rare. Halloween and its sundry sequels and remakes are at the front of the pack. Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon, with its children’s Halloween party gone awry, is a wonderful seasonal mood piece, as is the “Sleepy Hollow” episode of Disney’s marvelous Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. More recent examples are Rob Zombie’s House of 1,000 Corpses, a rummage through dusty Halloween decorations stored in an attic reeking with dankness, and Michael Dougherty’s Trick ‘r Treat, a picture I didn’t care for but one that has some truly rabid proponents who adore its nostalgic ambience. Something Wicked This Way Comes begins just a week before Halloween in a golden October in which “1,000 pumpkins lie waiting to be cut,” and movies don’t come richer in autumnal atmosphere than Jack Clayton’s. The neo-cult classic May finds the title character collecting some bloody booty during a psychotic trick-or-treat excursion. As the kids of The Blair Witch Project prepare for their own excursion into the woods, we see Halloween decorations in shop windows, so that one passes muster too.

There are exceptions to this seemingly obvious rule. Movies with Halloween scenes aren’t always ideal holiday fare. Classics they may be, but I wouldn’t want to spend the night of spooks watching, To Kill a Mockingbird, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, or Meet Me in St. Louis, though a chorus of “Clang, clang, clang went the trolley” has been known to terrify.

Certain movies are pretty safe to categorize as honorary Halloweeners. We know that a man may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright, but for all we know The Wolf Man takes place in late September, November, or shudder to think, early December. Nevertheless, it’s a good choice, so try not to get too hung up on when exactly Larry Talbot’s life goes to pot.

Films that immediately break the seasonal spell are those that glaringly take place in the wrong season or environment: desert horrors such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Near Dark, seaside ones such as The Birds, or snowy ones such as The Thing. And perish the thought of watching one that takes place on a completely different holiday! That means no Gremlins (Christmas), Jaws (4^th of July), or April Fool’s Day (April Fool’s Day). If you lived in the New York area during the late seventies/early eighties, you may also find that King Kong has too many Thanksgiving associations to enjoy it on October 31^st. With its island and metropolitan settings, it’s not very Halloweeny anyway.

You get an F for effort, King Kong.

Creature from the Black Lagoon is a bit of a grey area. On the one hand, no environment recalls Halloween less than the Amazon (except maybe space, which means no Alien!). On the other hand, as the studio’s ad campaign once insisted, “Universal IS Halloween.” Considering the place its iconic monsters hold in Halloween costumes, decorations, and holiday movie marathons, exceptions can be made for Black Lagoon and the snowy Invisible Man. Go ahead and enjoy them with a clear conscience on October 31^st. That being said, more ideal selections would be Dracula, The Mummy, Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, or The Wolf Man. But you already knew about that last one.

Halloween is a distinctly western holiday, so at the risk of coming off xenophobic (I swear I’m not! Some of my best friends are xenos!), Asian horror films may not exactly hit that sweet spot. Still, North American Halloween influences have become pretty internationally pervasive over the years, so if you still feel compelled to spend your holiday with Godzilla or that cute little girl from Ringu, that is your prerogative. I also encourage you to indulge in movies centered on such seasonal tropes as haunted houses (recommended: Robert Wise’s The Haunting), black cats (recommended: Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat), witches (recommended: John Llewellyn Moxey’s The City of the Dead), pumpkins (recommended: Stan Winston’s Pumpkinhead), and candy corn (recommended: TK).

Oh yeah. That's the stuff.

Just remember that as kooky and crazy as Halloween is, there are rules to enjoying it. Stay safe. Always wear reflective clothing. Check your candy for razor blades and light artillery. And no matter what you do, follow every guideline I’ve delineated above. Doing so just may save your life.

Diary of the Dead 2012: Week 2

I’m logging my Monster Movie Month © viewing with ultra-mini reviews every Monday in October (as was the case last year, I’ll only be discussing movies I haven’t reviewed elsewhere on this site). I write it. You read it. No one needs to get hurt.

October 8

The Funhouse (1981- dir. Tobe Hooper) **

Some kids hide out in a funhouse overnight to screw around, and a monster in a Frankenstein mask stalks them. I was always under the impression The Funhouse was a slasher movie. I usually don’t like slasher movies, which is why it took me so long to get around to seeing this beloved flick. It’s really more of a gore-free monster movie (can we agree the killer is way too monstrous to consider a disfigured human?). The distastefully sleazy attitude is pure slasher, though. I prefer fun sleazy, like a John Waters movie. There just isn’t enough fun in this funhouse. It’s also way too slow for a movie with characters this uninteresting. Just kill them and get it over with already! Sheesh.

October 9

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000- dir. Joe Berlinger) **

I confess to mild curiosity about the infamously awful Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, partly because I love the original, partly because following up that unique and genuinely terrifying picture with a run-of-the-mill horror movie is such an awful idea. And who doesn’t love watching a disaster? The prologue shares some of the DIY aesthetic of The Blair Witch Project, even as it plays as a dumb commercial for that movie. The rest of Book of Shadows looks more like I Know What You Did Last Summer. Some idiot Blair Witch Project fans go into the woods, have idiotic discussions about the movie, and go crazy. Idiotically. The implication that all of their drinking, drugging, and sexing leads to murder is stock slasher movie bullshit. The rampant post modernism is a lame substitute for actual wit. Too non-descript to qualify as a truly bad movie, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 isn’t even good for a laugh. Watch Troll 2 instead.

October 10

It (1990- dir. Tommy Lee Wallace) ***½

Stephen King’s greatest novel is a brick-thick epic about a shape-shifting, generation-spanning evil. Adapting It as a TV miniseries isn’t the most complimentary treatment, but as far as those things go, it isn’t bad. In fact, Tim Curry is downright unforgettable as Penny Wise the Dancing Clown, the evil’s favorite form. We meet The Losers Club, a band of heroes who go toe to toe with It, as kids and adults. It has often been said that the kids’ portion of the film is the most compelling, and that’s no lie. The adult cast is OK, but the “Circus of the Stars” aftertaste is a bit distracting (See John Ritter from “Three’s Company”! See Harry Anderson from “Night Court”! See John Boy and Venus Flytrap too!). The production values can be chintzy, which isn’t much of a problem until the spidery showdown that ends the three hours like a wet fart. Still, the kids are fun, Curry is a gas, and on a more personal note, this is the flick that got me hooked on Stephen King novels when I was a teenager. For that, I’ll always be extra forgiving of It and award it an extra half star. Extra points for cutting the whole kiddie orgy in the sewer sequence. Ick.

October 11

Lifeforce (1985- dir. Tobe Hooper) **½

A naked space vampire stalks London. Mayhem and pubic hair ensue. Lifeforce is like The Thing remade by Bob Guccione. Tobe Hooper takes this material too seriously, so what could have been a ridiculous hoot ends up just plain ridiculous. As is so often the case, lots of nudity goes hand-in-hand with a really uptight attitude about sex. Maybe it’s more like The Thing remade by General Ripper from Dr. Strangelove. Gotta deny that lady vampire your essence, fellas! I liked the corpse puppets though.

October 12

Slither (2006- dir. James Gunn) ****

You know how you always wanted to watch a bunch of gun-toting yahoos face off against a swarm of tongues from outer space? Well, it may have been a long wait, but Slither finally arrived in 2006. Ex-Troma member James Gunn turned in a nerdy homage seemingly inspired by Shaun of the Dead’s union of graphic gore and ironic humor, though it is more horrifying and less funny than Shaun. Whereas Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright’s movie used Romero’s zombie pictures as its chief reference, Slither draws on zombie movies and the classic B-grade sci-fi chillers of the ‘50s. That’s value. Plus, there’s a great cast anchored by Nathan Fillion, Elizabeth Banks, Michael “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer” Rooker.

Psychobabble’s 200 Essential Horror Movies Part 8: The 1990s

In this feature, Psychobabble creeps through 100 years of horror cinema to assemble a highly personal list of the genre’s 200 most monstrous works, decade by decade.

(Updated in September 2021)

143. The Witches (1990- dir. Nicholas Roeg)

July 14, 2009: The Blair Witch Project

Although its reputation seems to have diminished considerably over the years, when The Blair Witch Project premiered a decade ago today, it was considered to be a revolutionary piece of cinema. First of all, there’s the radical way it was produced. Filmmakers Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick set amateur actors Heather Donohue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael C. Williams loose in the woods of Burkittsville, Maryland, for eight days with a camera and sound equipment. The actors were responsible for filming their own scenes and adlibbing their dialogue. Sanchez and Myrick left them little notes indicating the plot developments. All of this cost somewhere in the neighborhood of five grand, but raked in an astounding $248,639,099 at the box office, partly due to a brilliant advertising campaign suggesting that the events in the movie were real (here come the spoilers).

Then there’s the movie. Forgoing contemporary horror flick staples like elaborate special effects, graphic gore, and boobs, The Blair Witch Project cast its spell with verisimilitude, atmosphere, and an easily relatable premise. While few know what it’s like to be stalked by a supernatural mental patient dressed like the goalie from the Philadelphia Flyers, most know what it’s like to be lost. In The Blair Witch Project, three college kids get lost in the woods of Burkittsville (formerly Blair) while making a documentary about local mythical monster the Blair Witch. A year after they go missing, their footage is found. In this footage, the kids argue, hear some spectral crackling in the woods, argue, find some creepy twigs, receive a care package full of bloody teeth, argue, run out of cigarettes, argue, cry, argue, and come upon a derelict house where some vaguely disturbing shit goes down. That’s about it.


So, what was the big deal with The Blair Witch Project? For a lot of viewers, there was no big deal. That portion of the audience rated the movie as the worst kind of hype and left the theater feeling severely hoodwinked and possibly sea sick from the shaky handheld camerawork. The rest of the audience was apparently chilled to its core. I’ve discussed The Blair Witch Project with many people over the years, and I’ve rarely encountered anyone who does not fall into either the “love it” or “loathe it” camps. When I saw it for the first time, I remember feeling a bit cheated as the credits rolled (although there certainly were moments in the movie that got under my skin). Then a friend pointed out that the final image related to something discussed earlier in the film. That’s when I first started stepping out of the cheated camp and into the chilled. The real decisive moment arrived when I got into bed that night and could not shake the image of a figure facing the corner with its head bowed. I couldn’t sleep. Same deal the next night. And the next. Seriously. Thinking another viewing might help me shake the eerie sensation, I went to see the movie again. No dice. So I saw it for the third time in a week. I’d never done that before.

Over the subsequent decade, I’ve watched The Blair Witch Project many times, and it still has not lost its power. The scene in which the kids’ tent is assaulted by the pounding of little phantom hands and that final encounter in the house still get my heart spazzing-out and my palms dripping as much as they did ten years ago. I also continue to be struck by the strength and commitment of the three actors. Sure, part of the reason they so convincingly portray a bunch of stressed-out, hungry, exhausted kids is because they actually were stressed-out, hungry, and exhausted. The two guys famously got on poorly with Heather. The woods were cold. They had no way of knowing whether or not the entire ordeal was just an immense waste of time. But there is also subtlety in these portrayals. Mike is the most amiable of the characters, although he can get pretty ugly when pushed too far. Josh ping-pongs between peace maker and obnoxious antagonist. Heather initially comes off as a pretentious drama geek seeking credibility as a documentary filmmaker (and she’s a pretty terrible one. Notice how she never shuts up while conducting interviews). However, she’s also the only one who is serious about her work and she feels genuinely guilty about masterminding the project that leads the trio to their doom. Her much-parodied “I’m sorry” monologue is completely authentic and as riveting a scene as you’re likely to see in any film. A good deal of the horror comes from watching these three normal kids disintegrate, but the real reason The Blair Witch Project is so terrifyingly effective is because it gives viewers (at least viewers with overactive imaginations) such a wide and blank canvas to paint with their own fears. Sanchez and Myrick knew, just as the great Val Lewton did, that whatever you conjure in your imagination is infinitely more frightening than some scaly monster or buckets of Karo syrup blood.


So am I a dupe? An easily manipulated schmuck who allows himself to be frightened by a whole lot of nothing? Many will answer “yes”, but a horror movie has a job to do, and if it gets that job done, it’s a quality horror film. Just as a comedy’s job is to make me laugh, a horror movie’s job is to scare me, and no film scares me as consistently and profoundly as The Blair Witch Project does. It may not be the most sophisticated or the wittiest or the most aesthetically pleasing horror movie ever made, but for my ten bucks, it’s the scariest… ten years on and counting.