31 Days Of Horror XIV: Officially A Reimagining, Bur We Don’t Know Why
Also at Bluesky
I will, as is traditional, also try to mention gameability of the films.
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0: A History Of Horror with Mark Gatiss (2010)
Gatiss, of The League Of Gentlemen and recent BBC Ghost Stories For Christmas, got to interview various creators for BBC Four in this and the follow-up series European Horror, based almost entirely on his personal favourites. Lucky devil. I saw it at the time, and spotted it on Amazon Prime. Gatiss makes for fun company, and the choices mean we get a decent visit to everyone he talks to.
On Prime Video, though it still has the BBC Four station outros on two of the three episodes.
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1: Dracula (1958)
Hammer’s version changes as much from the book as the Universal one, but it has Lee and Cushing, colour, the tear-down-the-curtains finale and the “DRA-CUU-LAAA!” theme tune.
Gameability: Skilled monster hunters who sometimes have to improvise wildly. Yes, that’s gameable.
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2: Beetlejuice (1988)
I haven't seen Beetlejuice all the way through in a while... and when I say a while I mean about twenty years. I saw it when it came out (age 14 and it was a 15 certificate at the time, don't tell anyone) and loved Tim Burton’s messy variety of cartoon-Goth skits more or less telling a story. So with the sequel in cinemas, here I am rewatching ahead of going to see it, and finding that I remember most of the fun stuff pretty clearly but had mentally downplayed more casual jokey references to suicide than I expected and some really not okay then let alone now representation. Add the sympathetic characters played by men I don’t want to see again and it was a rather mixed revisit.
The medium: DVD
Gameability: Cartoony-powered ghosts versus the unwelcome living in their haunted house, plus a scattershot view of the afterlife with a purgatorial bureaucracy, dangerous parallel planes and ghosts being endangered by exorcism, and a main character who might be a demon rather than a ghost. Beetlejuice may well have fed into Wraith: The Oblivion though it differs wildly in tone - Wraith: The Oblivion 20th Anniversary Edition tips its hit with an introductory book called Handbook For The Recently Deceased.
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3: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)
Well, that was thirty-six years in development and felt like two first drafts held together with unabsorbed studio notes.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, among other things, has the worst case of sequel villain bloat I’ve ever seen and I’m pretty sure it was by accident, replaces the musical stylings of Harry Belafonte with those of Richard Harris, goes to great trouble to include Charles without featuring the original actor except in stills and also writes out the Maitlands in a way so lazy it’s almost ballsy in its audacity.
I also kind of admire their commitment to the Mario Bava and Soul Train references, though would have more if they’d been in any way funny and/or a good two minutes shorter each.
Although Delia gets more to do, which is nice.
The medium: well, the cinema seat was comfy.
Gameability: About as much as the first, though I'd include a “people can find those they care about in the afterlife very conveniently” power.
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4: The Devil Rides Out (1968)
Christopher Lee got to play the good guy now and then at Hammer, most notably here in an adaptation of the Dennis Wheatley novel, scripted by Richard Matheson (Duel, I Am Legend, The Night Stalker and most related a number of the Roger Corman Poe adaptations) and directed by Hammer stalwart Terence Fisher. He plays the Duc/Duke De Richleau, one of Wheatley’s recurring heroes, an occult expert who takes on a genteel Satanic cult led by Charles Gray (the narrator in The Rocky Horror Picture Show) as Mocata in a very Night Of The Demon cult-leader-as-polite-meeting-Bond-villain way.
Beside some shaky period details, a bit of lighting that suggests a ritual takes two days, and the disappointingly cute Goat Of Mendes, it’s top shelf Hammer. Lee is authoritative and commanding, sidekick Rex gets to punch out Devil worshippers, Tanith and Marie get more to do than many horror heroines, and the overall serious tone (with occasional jokes that land just right) grounds a story with guest appearances by the Angel of Death, name drops for Osiris by the heroes and villains, and a very straight-up Deus ex Machina ending.
I wonder if, like Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter it was a potential series. I would happily watch more of Lee as Hammer’s Doctor Strange.
The medium: The Box.
Gameability: 1920s-30s occult investigators taking on cults could work. Ahem. This may well also be why They Came From Beyond The Grave has a statblock for THE DEVIL HIMSELF.
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5: Savageland (2015)
I had never heard of this until the day before, when I saw it recommended in the thread a few hours after Reactor mentioned it starting a Bluesky thread about underrated horror films. So I took the hint.
It’s a mockumentary built around an interview and talking heads covering the massacre of a small town and the photographs taken by the suspect and only survivor. Once you get a look at the photos you can see where it’s going, but it’s a very different perspective, well made. Content warning for the mundane horrors of racism as well as the regular genre horror.
The medium: Tubi
Gameability: The kind of thing we see from the survivor’s POV is easy to do, but an investigation of the aftermath with insufficient evidence could be an interesting spin.
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6: No Escape / Follow Me (2020)
When I watched the big-budget Escape Room duology last year I discovered that Holland Roden, one of the stars of the second, had been in an unconnected “killer escape room” movie a year before. And seeing it was on Tubi (as No Escape) and Prime (as Follow Me) I decided to compare and contrast.
Online “go and do weird and possibly scary things” star Cole is celebrating ten years of his channel with his friends who’ve arranged a trip to Russia for a bespoke invitation-only escape room. The trip has a few bumps before they arrive, and when they get there it’s...
Have there been any non-horror movies about escape rooms? They must be up there with extreme haunted house attractions for activities the genre gives a bed rep to.
(And this one includes the characters watching a different movie called Escape Room, made by this film’s writer and director Will Wernick in 2017. He obviously had ideas left over.)
Anyway, this is a more down-to-earth take than the two big ones where the rooms would require Disney Imagineers to build (the Witches’ Road tests from Agatha All Along are about as practical) and doesn’t stick around that bit very long. (It takes about half an hour to get there in an hour and a half including credits.) I guessed the twist, though wasn’t sure where they'd go with it. It may remind you of another activity-gone-scarily-far movie - The Game.
It doesn’t quite work for me as Cole has one big flaw heavily underscored and then something else trips him up at the end, but I had some gallows humour chuckles on the way there.
The medium: Prime or Tubi, Prime had fewer ad breaks.
Gameability: Killer escape rooms: that’s half the basis of Dungeons & Dragons! And a game gone wrong where you can’t call for help is a solid horror basis too. Question is do you use puzzles to test player skill or not...
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7: The Black Phone (2022)
I skipped The Black Phone in cinemas because it didn’t sound like much fun and also because it was 2022, so just got around to it now due to the big new TV.
Since it’s about that suburban folk devil the child abductor in the van with the creepy camp demeanour, butt got a big cinema release and said monster is played by Ethan Hawke, I knew it had to bring more to the table than that, besides the eponymous phone with messages from his previous victims.
Much put-upon teen Finney lives in a suburb of 1970s Denver stalked by a child abductor, and the most recent victims are closer and closer to his life, (The 1970s setting mostly seems to be so Finney knows how a rotary phone works.)
Finn’s sister Gwen has some dream insights, which she shared with her late mother and attributes to divine intervention, at one point leading her to ask “Jesus, what the fuck?” as her dreams fail to deliver. Her foulmouthed performance adds some very much-needed levity to the proceedings.
Based on a story from Joe Hill, I couldn’t help but glumly wonder how much of the portrayal of the kids’ alcoholic father comes from his own life. He also makes a big turn during the film, which could have felt more organic.
Overall I was right at the time that it wasn’t much fun, but I did appreciate the payoff.
The medium: Netflix
Gameability: It’s kind of an escape room, complete with tip line.
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8: It’s What’s Inside (2024)
Getting its own entry as it’s new to Netflix as of this weekend. Horror-adjacent as a dark comedy with an SF/F premise.
A group of more-or-less friends meet up years after their college closeness, including a tech genius who brings a game of sorts...
A body-swapping device that can switch all eight of them around. So they can guess who’s who.
And they’re mostly drunk and/or high enough to go for this, and for it to spiral out of control.
Writer-director Greg Jardin has some tricks to stop it getting too confusing, while keeping it confusing.in places, as well as some other flourishes like the flashbacks appearing as Photoshoppy edits as they’re discussed and corrected.
(I wonder why the key prop design looks like a 1970s amp rather than something new and shiny, it makes the connection-switching really clear but suggests a possible backstory about the tech’s age that doesn’t come up.)
I laughed a fair bit. I suspected a plot turn was coming partially due to out-of-character reasons but didn’t get close to everything.
The medium: An indie film Netflix brought in.
Gameability: Another game going wrong. Including a shoutout to “Mafia, Werewolf, whatever”. This particular game would be hard to keep track of, but certainly something that can come up in a weird enough setting.
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9: Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022)
Mentioned in relation to It’s What’s Inside as it's also a dark comedy about game night gone wrong in a big house. The trailer and marketing emphasised the very twentysomething language most of the characters use but that’s a pretty small part of it.
Before they get too comically paranoid, their panic at the first death actually feels pretty realistic. Likewise, I really appreciated the in-camera lighting from phones and torches showing just how dark it is at night without power. And it got a fair number of laughs, including a proper big one at one reveal.
Gameability: It could easily be a Fiasco playest. And the game itself, another variant on Werewolf/Mafia mixed with Hide And Seek, could be fun if it didn’t end like this one. I’d advise against the warmup exercise though.
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10: Baghead (2023)
A young woman finds her estranged father owned a creepy old pub, she has to sign an old deed with a specific pen, and someone is willing to pay heavily to visit the basement.
Another small group of characters in a grimy basement with an unreliable connection to the voices of the dead, and another game of sorts. A much more regular horror movie take on a similar idea to Talk To Me as you can only speak with the dead for a couple of minutes before it goes bad. (It’s based on a 2017 short, so unlucky to be later.)
Well acted as something like this which could work as a play needs to be, but the main surprises are a big illustrated infodump and that it isn’t set in Britain due to the cast.
Gameability: It’s a simple enough setup for a “bad things in the hidden corners of the world” kind of setting, and as noted could have been played out well or badly many times before with different visitors.
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11: Salem’s Lot (2022)
Apparently director Gary Dauberman handed in a three hour version, released at just over two it’s by far the shortest adaptation and loses a lot of the flavour of the town slowly falling, but the streamlining is largely fine, remixing the 1979 version in particular. Someone coming in unfamiliar with the book or the previous adaptation would get it, though might wonder why it was named after the town. I largely nodded along, and thought a couple of bits didn’t hit, but I really liked the play on the sunset race at the end.
It escaped its streaming doom here, and seeing it in the cinema probably helped with some of the little details seen only in the dark.
Gameability: Small group of regular people (in this very quickly) discovering and facing horrors in a small town. So, yes. Although Mark’s clearly playing a different game system to everyone else. (RPG fan bonus, a Vampire: The Masquerade Actual Play regular baring fangs on the big screen.)
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12: Jurassic World: Dominion (2022)
Battle At Big Rock short film set between Fallen Kingdom and Dominion, which gets to the scary part right away
The Jurassic Park and World trilogies have always been on the horror-adjacent adventure end of “monster” movies, more so than Jaws, Steven Spielberg’s adventure-adjacent horror with a big carnivore. How much horror gets in varies from film to film, but there’s always at least one “stalked by a dinosaur” scene.
And since I also watched a couple of full-fledged horror films this weekend that had nothing I felt like writing about, here we are.
That introductory short very much plays up how scary these things could be, but this particular film doesn’t, instead playing a sub Indiana Jones international adventure romp with added dinosaurs in the black market sale and roguish pilot until it inevitably gets to the enclosed area full of dinosaurs. And those bits are fine, but after the first World was a retread of Park like its own sequels I like that the World follow-ups mix in different genres.
This has the legacy sequel crossover problem of too many characters which the first two World films avoided and this one jumps straight into, but balances them... okay. The ending didn’t entirely convince, after nearly six films of people being worried about dinosaurs getting out it’s not really that big of a deal?
The medium: Netflix, also home to the YA animated series in case there aren’t enough kids in danger normally.
Gameability: There are RPGs and setting subsections about avoiding being eaten by dinosaurs through cloning, time travel and the like. This opens a setting so that could be a regular issue.
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13: Watcher (2022)
Maika Monroe plays a young American woman moving to Bucharest with her husband for his work - he’s Romanian-American and fluent and she can barely order coffee - and noticing someone staring out of the window across the street from their new apartment. With a serial killer on the news who once struck within walking distance, her isolation starts to get the better of her. Or is it that while she doesn’t understand what most people are saying, body language doesn’t need a translation?
Director Chloe Okuno often keeps the camera still for long takes at a distance like an outside observer, and of course Monroe starred in It Follows so this encouraged me to look in the corners of the frame. She’s great playing increasingly tense but not as shaken as everyone seems to think.
The medium: Netflix, near the top of the thriller band rather than in horror, but remembering coverage from Bloody Disgusting when it came out on the festival circuit I figured it was worth a go. And it lets me flag it up here for those who might not know it's there.
Gameability: How would you cope with a language barrier on top of the problems a given adventure brings?
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14: Fall (2022)
Taking a break from the horror genre of monsters and such to something I knew would hit the pure emotional OH NO button.
I saw the trailer for Fall and determined I’d wait and watch it at home so I could pause it if I had to.
Two free-climbing friends reunite after one lost her husband in, yes, a fall. She’s been shut down for a year since, and her friend asks her to come with her to get back out there by climbing a derelict two-thousand-foot TV tower.
As you can guess by it being in this thread it doesn't go entirely well - but even if it had it could still be here.
The trailer notes it comes from the producers of shark-tank-failure movie 47 Meters Down, and it shares that small cast stuck in a perilous situation, as well as a plot point that bugged me about the previous film and bugged me more seeing it again. I feel it could have been stronger if it lost a couple of side trips and just laser focused on the premise, because when it’s on it delivers that OH NO really well. The plentiful shots of loose screws or other poorly-maintained piece of tower architecture got me before it really started, and the various misfortunes getting in their way had me rooting for them, or in one case laughing at the meanness of it.
Oh, and if you see the theatrical version, they dubbed out thirty F-bombs for a lower rating and it can be distracting to hear people say “freaking” every few minutes.
The medium: Netflix, and yes I paused it a couple times. (Annoyingly has the un-sweary version even though it was a 15 certificate here anyway.)
Gameability: I could certainly imagine it working with Dread, the RPG using Jenga as the mechanic where you have to remove a piece every time your PC does something dangerous and they’re out of the game if it falls...
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15: Shadow In The Cloud (2021)
Trailer which spoils the most “wow, really?” moment in the film and a clear chunk of the very last scene
Chloë Grace Moretz follows a huge number of horror remakes with something new, playing a courier in WWII who isn’t entirely welcome on a supply flight even before the introductory cartoon’s warning about gremlins comes back in force.
Unfun fact: This is one of the scripts Max Landis got made before being exposed as a predator.
Running for 75 minutes it’s an odd little exercise in form, half the time being a one-woman show and audio play with our hero stuck in a gun turret and the rest of the cast only on the radio. Content warning, the language used is extremely harsh. But when the action hits it’s amusingly over the top. And the gremlin doesn’t let the side down.
(The Carpenter-y synth soundtrack feels like an odd choice for a 1940s period piece as well.)
The medium: I found this was on the BBC iPlayer while looking for something else. I remembered being curious, having forgotten about Max Landis.
Gameability: More like a session of a pulp action game than anything horror.
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16: Smile (2022)
Having skipped this at the cinema, being curious about the sequel mostly for the change in setting, and it premiering on network TV as a boost for said sequel but I could watch it without ads on Netflix...
The overall focus on trauma aside, it mostly reminded me of It Follows to begin with as well as the countdown from Ring (and in turn Casting The Runes) and then Oculus. And the birthday party scene is a standout despite not really fitting, but it made me suspect someone involved has seen The Nightshifter (2018), which is on Shudder if you want to compare unwelcome surprise gifts.
I liked the threat jarring with modern clinical and suburban settings... until it lost that for the end. The prison visit highlighted in the linked teaser worked well too. So I didn’t feel I'd wasted my time, but I liked the big influences more.
And I was actually expecting more creepy smiling people. Looks like the sequel does more of that because the trailer for it is full of that.
The medium: Netflix
Gameability: Pretty standard creepy one-shot, mostly a question of how much you play up the illusions, which can always be tricky in RPGs.
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Okay, time to use that semi-regular month of Shudder to catch up on exclusives and recent cinema releases, because Shudder UK doesn't have half the catalogue of other countries so isn't worth it every year.
17: Deadstream (2022)
I remember seeing positive “Evil Dead II homage” things about this, and it’s in there, with enough of a difference due to the live stream format for its particular cowardly idiot hero.
(Also the second “guy who does stupid dangerous stuff online for views” movie for me this month, the other not being based around the footage.)
Gameability: Comedy-horror with doofuses going into classic horror stories, not hard.
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18: From Black (2023)
I hadn’t heard of this but watched based on the trailer. I nearly stopped right away when I recognised the atmospheric introductory quote about the dark from Matthew Stover is from his (great) novelisation of Revenge Of The Sith, but I’m glad I proceeded.
How far would you go to bring someone back? It’s a question going back further than Orpheus. And it doesn't generally end well.
As a horror drama about the extensive demands of a ritual it reminded of A Dark Song, though goes more traditional at the end. Anna Camp, best known as the sunny but callous evangelical in True Blood, plays a mother whose son went missing while she was away getting high, trying to put her life back together when offered a chance to bring him back. From the organiser of her survivor support meeting, no less, which is a very dark little turn.
The medium: Shudder
Gameability: Probably something like Unknown Armies or Kult.
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19: (The) Superdeep (2020)
Trailer which ends on the one really good “yikes” moment in the film
A Russian The Thing knockoff (with science borrowed from more modern horrors) set in the 1980s, the time rubber-monster-in-lab films were at their height, here to put it at the end of the Soviet era so government science projects and cover-ups were also a big thing.
Scientists have discovered something in the titular 12000-metre borehole, and an epidemiologist is sent in with some troops and a government overseer to investigate. Infection, panic, wobbly rubber monsters and CG threats ensue. The most interesting cultural difference is that the sinister government overseer does the right thing at the end while some others don’t. The most effective tweak on the monster is that some of the people it's made from are still screaming.
The medium: Shudder exclusive. AFAICT it only has an English dub with some very varied accents.
Gameability: It’s a basic adventure structure. The group dynamic could be a good example for the Communist space faction in ALIEN.
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20: The Reckoning (2020)
Neil Marshall (Dog Soldiers, The Descent) bounces back somewhat after his Hellboy film with a witch hunt movie that had the misfortune to be about a plague outbreak and filmed in 2019 for a 2020 release. It’s weirdly paced - about half an hour of setup, then the witch accusations happen in one two-minute scene like an Edgar Wright montage, followed by forty-five minutes of not quite super-graphic torture before a denouement that’s actually kind of fun but not fun enough after all that. And it comes loaded with content warnings for threat of sexual assault, slurs and more. Also a Devil subplot that doesn’t really go anywhere (but does result in an homage to Boris Vallejo’s Demon Lover), a costume design taking the plague doctor mask resembling a bird skull way too literally, and the funniest unconvincing gore effect I’ve seen this year. But I did appreciate the varied reactions to the accusations, and Marshall stalwart Sean Pertwee is better than necessary as the mostly soft-spoken witchfinder.
The medium: Shudder
Gameability: Chaotic and desperate times are good choices for adventuring.
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21: The Blair Witch Project (1999)
October 21st marks the thirtieth anniversary of the last day anyone saw film students Heather Donahue, Mike Williams or Joshua Leonard alive.
Okay, not really but you know that, right?
The Blair Witch Project became a huge hit thanks to a fantastic early internet marketing campaign and the (not really convincing) question of whether it could be real, but it was the trope codifier for found footage horror because it works. It wastes no time in setting expectations with that declaration after the title card, establishes that these kids are going to the woods to look into a legendary monster and that Heather and Mike don’t actually know each other in the first three minutes, spends ten minutes setting up the legend through variably-helpful vox pops, and then off we go to see very little rather than have the shaky handheld cameras conveniently catch things and watch the cast melt down over the remaining hour. Having seen plenty of “get on with it!” setups and format-breaking shots and twists since, it’s a classic of the subgenre.
The medium: DVD which comes with the accompanying fake documentary Curse Of The Blair Witch which is fun but muddies some of the clarity of the film itself.
Gameability: Making it was essentially a LARP. There have been official computer games, mystery envelope games and an escape experience, though they all tend to go too much into the lore side and/or show monsters, as well as various media influenced by it. You could certainly do an un-LARP tabletop version, perhaps with unreliable maps...
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22: Hush (2016)
Mike Flanagan has parted ways with Netflix so no big miniseries this year, and this earlier work is on Shudder. A riff on Wait Until Dark with a deaf protagonist (Kate Siegel, also co-writer) instead of a blind one fending off a home invasion, and after the introductory setup it’s pretty much one sustained scene. Apart from a couple of asides to allow for dialogue, one which didn’t work for me, it’s almost all done with action and not even much music, and keeps raising the stakes really well.
Also, our hero is the author of a book called Midnight Mass and the characters named also appear in the later series. As someone who often has trouble coming up with character names I can relate!
Medium: Shudder
Gameability: Sometimes all it takes is one threat and a problem to complicate things.
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23: In A Violent Nature (2024)
Not as serious as the foreboding title suggests, this is essentially a Friday The 13th sequel from Jason’s POV - or more accurately a third-person video game style POV following him. A hulking killer rises from the dead in the woods, sadly not supernaturally equipped to sense the thing he’s trying to retrieve so he has to rely on regular senses to find people to hunt down. The late viewpoint change from slasher to Final Girl is taken as literally as possible. One of the kills actually beats The Reckoning for worst of the month thus far as here it’s a long absurdity rather than a short effects failure, one of the exposition drops is both unnecessary and hilarious, and overall it feels (a) like an interesting format experiment that could have been covered in twenty minutes and (b) like watching someone play Dead By Daylight. I laughed a few times, but I suspect only some of them were intentional. I kind of wish it had ended halfway through when he gets distracted by a toy car.
The medium: Shudder
Gameability: We have plenty of games simulating this kind of thing. A single-player game following a slasher could work...
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24: Azrael (2024)
Did you know Azrael is out on Shudder already after a limited US cinema run? I only found out by seeing it mentioned in an io9 list as Shudder itself didn’t want to tell me. Indeed, when I checked Wikipedia after confirming it was there its still listed as streaming on Shudder “at a later date”. But it’s there, honest! (At least in the U.K.)
Azrael stars Samara Weaving as a post-Rapture survivor who like many has had her vocal cords seared, including a local cult out collecting sacrifices to feed and placate the burned people, vampiric things living in the woods. This sets off a roaring rampage of revenge which is great fun and might have been even more fun played purely as grisly action without the possible supernatural side.
The medium: Shudder, despite its attempts to hide it
Gameability: A story where hardly any of the characters can speak would be tricky to play in a vocal medium like RPGs, but the switch from description to lack of dialogue would stand out.
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26: Black As Night (2021)
Another of the Welcome To The Blumhouse made-for-Prime movies, this one being very much in my wheelhouse as teenagers fight vampires. It has a likeable young cast and some fun monster styling, as well as an interesting throughline about Black beauty standards, but it’s wildly tonally swingy keeping a largely light tone but having deaths played grimly serious, and the voiceover introduces some nice descriptive elements but also appears to gloss over a plot development like they added it in post, which given how quickly it comes and goes may have been the case. It’s also the first thing in any media I’ve seen in years to run with the “going undercover as sex workers” trope, which is not okay but I guess works as an example of a terrible plan kids might try.
The medium: Prime
Gameability: Young people having to fight monsters in secret, in a (sometimes) funny way, I once ran that for six years.
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27: Oddity (2024)
After a creepy played-straight introduction that cuts before the key murder, the victim’s sister seeks answers, using her power of psychometry and an array of cursed items, including the heavily featured lifesize articulated wooden carving of a screaming man, which is mostly there to be weird and disturbing in a sort of funny way. And the whole film pretty much feels like that, which worked once I got on its wavelength.
(At another scare point I realised I’d seen writer and director Damian Mc Carthy’s work before, as he revisits early short Hungry Hickory that screened here at Dead By Dawn.)
With a less prominent example in Black As Night, it made an unintentional double bill featuring an uncommon development - a character gets scared off and flees, successfully escaping the rest of the film.
The medium: Shudder
Gameability: Psychometry to get clues, using possibly cursed items as equipment. Bonus for spooky antique stores, which Friday The 13th: The Series among others demonstrates could be an ongoing plot hook.
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28: Late Night With The Devil (2024)
I skipped this at the cinema after learning it used Plagiarism Algorithm for station ident drawings, something it could easily edit out, but oh well.
But it’s really better suited to TV anyway, as it presents itself as a 1970s talk show. It’s not as good as Ghostwatch inevitably, but the period mix of sideburns and Satanic Panic works well. I wish the Randi-esque token sceptic hadn’t been such a dick though.
The medium: Shudder
Gameability: Like the original plan for Ghostwatch as a regular drama with the live broadcast being the finale, how would modern protagonists deal with a TV crew getting in the way of a monster hunt or wanting to interview them afterwards?
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29: Carved (2024)
I wanted something in the goofy Halloween horror area, and this new arrival from Hulu / Disney+ Star fits that perfectly, as a mutated pumpkin seeks slashery revenge on a carving contest. The central massacre gets previewed and then shown fully in the first half hour and after that it doesn’t really have more to say. And considering the premise one of the performances is somehow still too broad. (Although I did like the young protagonists being completely unbothered by a couple of the grownups revealing their secret gay relationship.) I wonder if it’s the result of someone being disappointed that Pumpkinhead wasn’t literal.
The medium: Hulu / Disney+
Gameability: Killer pumpkins and/or scarecrow-related beheading, it’s a seasonal staple. There’s a Call Of Cthulhu Blood Brothers adventure that plays it more seriously while still obviously not entirely seriously.
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30: Annihilation (2018)
Due to its extremely limited cinema release, Annihilation became a rare thing, a Netflix movie that has staying power. Based on a novel by Jeff VanderMeer, adapted and directed by Alex Garland, it stars Natalie Portman as a biologist joining a team heading into a zone affected by an unknown source of change. It’s more SF than horror, but has some gruesome moments as well as an overall grim tone. It has some striking visuals as well, although the abstract look of the climax does end up looking like an update of 1980s-90s “look what CGI can do!” animation demonstrations.
The medium: Netflix
Gameability: A small team goes in to investigate strange phenomena, though in this case the modern team dealing with a threat plays more Call of Cthulhu than Stargate.
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31:
Heretic (2024)
A pair of young Mormon women go to visit someone who claims to be curious to learn more, but the avuncular Mr. Reed actually wants to teach them something.
Heretic got Halloween “previews” before a regular Friday release, so much so that the adverts on the side of buses say PREVIEWS OCT 31 with a cartoon jack o’ lantern for the O, so I saw it in the afternoon with enough of a crowd to share chuckles at the jokes. Said adverts focus entirely on Hugh Grant smirking evilly. He’s having fun in his villain era as he did in Paddington 2 and Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves, while Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East have the less showy roles in what is largely a three-hander. They get to be smart enough to hold their own against Mr. Reed’s arguments as it moves from the living room to the also much advertised basement.
Also the first film I’ve seen to include a note that no generative AI was used in the production, which gets it a bonus point from me too.
The medium: The cinema!
Gameability: A sinister host presenting a game and a puzzle in a purpose-built “dungeon”... And at one point Mr. Reed calls someone an NPC!
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I actually passed 31 new-to-me films this month, but there were some I didn’t feel worth discussing.
Haunt (2019) is super generic, though did inspire watching No Escape and my resulting extreme haunted attraction joke. If it had had the twist I thought it might I would have given it an entry.
The Spirit Halloween Movie is the second-best possessed decorations movie of the last two of these.
Black Friday has Bruce Campbell parodying his usual self-parody but not much else.
V/H/S Beyond has one good story at the end (which got me to watch it) after one I actively loathed.
I was going to rewatch Beetlejuice (unfortunately) and The Blair Witch Project anyway, so got some writing out of them. And found a couple thanks to this and previous 31 Days threads.
More pleasant surprises than the couple of big letdowns.
And it was really nice to be out properly for Halloween again - crowd highlight was definitely the guy trying to negotiate our tiny local rock pub in an inflatable koala costume.
Happy Halloween!
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