Unshockingly, I watched a bunch of horror movies in October; perhaps even less shockingly, I got behind on writing them all up, so I’m going to do it as a round-up.

First up is Longlegs — the premise of this to some extent is, “What if The Silence of the Lambs were a horror film?” You’ve got FBI agents who are living in the ’90s (as a large photo of President Clinton hanging on the wall unsubtly indicates) who go investigate crime scenes with their extremely bright non-‘90s LED flashlights in search of a serial killer. But then… look, Nicolas Cage plays the titular character, so you don’t need me to tell you how weird this movie’s gonna get before it’s all over. I think it fails at being the “elevated horror” that it so clearly wants to be, but it’s still pretty good at being just regular ol’ 3-out-of-5-stars horror.

Next up is Inferno, a Dario Argento supernatural horror movie. (I want to call it a giallo, but there are people who are fussy about the usage of the term and specifically exclude movies like this and Suspiria; out of deference to their tender sensibilities, I will refrain.) Argento of course makes horror films that are way better than genre norm, I’d heard good things about this one, and it’s from his peak period, between Suspiria and Tenebrae. And so it’s a crashing disappointment that I found it to be actively bad. Part of the problem is surely that Goblin is missing from the score; their music alone might have brought it up to mediocrity. But a bigger problem is that it’s mostly set in New York, but then also has a whole section in Rome, with a sprawling story and cast (which of course makes no sense; that’s just genre baseline). At the end of the day, I think the movie is just too American for what it’s trying to do. A movie with this plot needs to be set in Italy and watched in Italian with subtitles; having English-speaking actors in New York just throws it off.

Obsession is also trying to do elevated horror, but here it’s basically successful. The premise here is a magical wish that — shockingly — goes awry[1] in ways that are very effectively creepy and also have a pretty heavy undertone of social commentary. It definitely works, but is arguably too effectively horrifying for my tastes in the middle. (And yeah, I get it: It’s a horror movie. I’m not taking points off for it, but if you’re a person who also likes your horror not to be too scary, well, this is one that goes there at times.) But by the end, it gets back to the character/story stuff that I found to be its strengths.

Next up is something that has no pretensions to “elevation” at all, Body Bags. This is a John Carpenter anthology movie that was originally intended to be the first episodes of a potential Showtime series, but then just got stitched into a movie. They should’ve made the show, because it would’ve been great. We’ve got one story that’s a fairly straightforward slasher at a gas station at night, and then two body horror episodes with a twist — one involving an evil eye, the other involving evil hair. As you might guess from the phrase “evil hair,” the movie doesn’t take itself very seriously, and it delivers on a gross-but-silly flavor of horror.

Jennifer’s Body is feminist social commentary horror. I didn’t pay attention to horror movies when it originally came out in 2009, but apparently at the time, it didn’t get a great reception for whatever reason. But since then, it’s gotten a critical reappraisal and is now seen as a cult classic. Gotta say, the reappraisal is right: The movie’s great. Diablo Cody’s script manages to perfectly hit a combination of horror and humor without feeling like it’s in the Avengers-imitative style that is the default register of mainstream movies; tonally, it combines a kind of heightened absurdity with a very mundane realism. It’d’ve been easy for this to go badly, but it all comes together in just the way you’d want it to. This is my October horror standout, and if you passed it up back in the day, it’s worth catching up with.

You’re Next is also a horror/comedy hybrid, this time around a combination home invasion masked killer/family dinner scenario; the horror comes from both parts of the movie. I thought the mix of horror and comedy worked well, except that for long stretches in the middle it just goes pure horror and gets uncomfortably tense. (This is again me just saying that there’s too much horror in the horror movie, so probably not a critique most people will share.)

Last up is From Dusk Till Dawn, written by Tarantino but directed by Robert Rodriguez. To some extent, it shows how much you need Tarantino’s directing to really make his dialogue work — he writes these very heavily stylized speeches, especially at this early point in his career, and if you don’t direct the scene just so, they come off feeling kinda fake. Which like: they are fake, nobody talks like that; but if you film it right, it can be amazing, and Rodriguez doesn’t quite manage that. Still, the movie is enjoyable enough, and I don’t think Tarantino would have been the right person to direct the horror fight scenes, so probably for the best to have Rodriguez behind the camera in the end. One surprising thing to me is how far you get into this movie before there are hints about the supernatural; I think that, like Psycho, it would be fascinating to go into this movie blind, just watching this Tarantino-scripted movie about bank robbers on the run… and then all the sudden, what the fuck?!?

  1. It is apparently inspired not just by the monkey paw story, but by the Simpsons episode with the monkey paw. There is a generation of people whose knowledge of culture is mediated by Simpsons parodies of it, clearly. And yes, I’m firmly in that generation. ↩︎