This October, to celebrate Halloween, I’m writing 31 mini reviews of scary movies. Here are the first 15:
Scary Movie Mini Review #1: The Munsters (2022)
Directed by Rob Zombie
A surprisingly cute, very silly and fairly faithful prequel to the original Munsters TV show. The stacked-to-the-ceiling art design, crazy colorful neon lighting and off-kilter camera angles are bonkers but mostly fun. My only quibbles: too much background music telegraphing the comedy when it’s already working fine without it, and maybe a bit too drawn out of a running time with a weirdly abrupt ending. If you like the Munsters and want to admire Rob Zombie’s unique filmmaking style without watching an R-rated gore-fest, I think you’ll mostly enjoy this.
Scary Movie Mini Review #2: The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015)
Directed by Oz Perkins
Tragic drama by way of horror, the Blackcoat’s Daughter is a story about an emotionally isolated young woman who feels so alone that she’s willing to be accepted by anyone who will have her, or in this case, any thing. The film is set in the depths of two frigid, snow-bound Februaries and vividly captures the desolate feelings winter can summon. Some disturbing violence unfolds, but it’s surprisingly overshadowed by empathetic, overwhelming sadness. An effective supernatural chiller that also feels very real.
Scary Movie Mini Review #3: Q – The Winged Serpent (1982)
Directed by Larry Cohen
What if the ending of King Kong was reversed and the men with the machine guns were on top of the building while the monster was flying around it? Cue the winged serpent. This movie is weird. It’s got a weird energy, a weird sense of humor and a weird way of editing together messily staged action and shouted, often muffled dialog. It’s also a very funny creature feature with ridiculously fake yet striking visual effects. At the center of the movie is the enthralling, almost too weird to be good performance by Michael Moriarty as a stumbling, mumbling would-be-crook on a power trip. He knows where the monster lives but he wants cash before he tells the cops. His scenes, especially one in a diner where a sullen David Carradine tries to trick him into revealing the monster’s location, are way more enthralling than any of the scenes with the eponymous stop-motion serpent. Bonus points if you can find the scenes that are uncannily similar to scenes from Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.
Scary Movie Mini Review #4: Pulse (2001)
Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa
As chilling as it is thoughtful, Pulse asks what’s the difference between lonely people and ghosts? Filled with dream logic nightmare imagery and hauntingly sparse colors, set design and composition, Pulse addresses the horrors of a technologically connected culture where no one is truly connected to anyone else. It’s also just a good ghost movie with plenty of scares. By the third act, it almost borders on sci-fi, but in a good way. Whatever you do, don’t go into the forbidden room!
Scary Movie Mini Review #5: The Curse of the Werewolf (1961)
Directed by Terence Fisher
Hammer horror films are a mixed bag for me. They have great atmosphere and beautiful color palettes but are often slow and talky with a lot of exposition and very little horror. Curse of the werewolf is no exception. The story is about as simple as you can get from a werewolf yarn. A doomed man turns beast, is chased, the end. The makeup is pretty cool, I just wish there were more scenes featuring it. It’s a decently crafted little story that could have used a bit more bite. I’ll stick with the Wolf Man.
Scary Movie Mini Review #6: Split (2016)
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
After his excellent and very underrated film The Village, M. Night Shyamalan took quite a detour into mediocrity and downright bad filmmaking for over a decade. Split is his return to form, a classic kidnapping story with a fun twist that allows its villain, played pitch-perfectly by James McAvoy, to portray a very complex and sympathetic array of characters and motivations. The horror in Split is very real, but it rarely crosses the line into tastelessness, and delivers almost as many laughs as scares. The film ends in an unusual and very thought-provoking place and leaves plenty of room for more story, which Shyamalan followed up on in 2019’s lesser sequel Glass.
Scary Movie Mini Review #7: Personal Shopper (2016)
Directed by Olivier Assayas
Nothing is quite like this movie, from the strange combination of realism and the fantastic, to the muted color 35mm cinematography and elaborate sound design, to the abrupt shifts in tone and plot. I like it a lot. It feels like a strangely fitting film to watch around Halloween as a kind of autumnal, atmospheric ghost story, but it’s also a Hitchcockian thriller and commentary on the relationships between the powerful and those who serve them. I can’t really say much more without spoiling it, but Kristen Stewart delivers a striking performance and this film is a great introduction to famed director Olivier Assayas’s work. It really is something to behold.
Scary Movie Mini Review #8: A Ghost Story (2017)
Directed by David Lowery
A Ghost Story does for ghosts what Toy Story did for toys. Like the best Pixar films, it brilliantly imagines and portrays what life—or, more aptly, the afterlife—might look like for the stereotypical white sheet-clad specter of popular fiction, often in humorously inventive ways. That’s not to say A Ghost Story isn’t also quite haunting and melancholy. It draws on a very real fear we all have at some point in our lives: the fear of what life would be like lived in a vacuum, utterly alone and unable to interact with the world around us or to perceive time correctly. These meditations are mournful and even a little existentially dreadful, but never downright scary. The movie doesn’t so much believe that ghosts exist as ask what they would be like if they did, and the results are both entertaining and thoughtful.
Scary Movie Mini Review #9: Night of the Demon (1957)
U.S. Title: “Curse of the Demon”
Directed by Jacques Tourneur
Based very loosely on a much more subtle M. R. James short story, Night of the Demon is a surprisingly entertaining 50’s British horror/adventure film about the battle between a skeptical scientist and a self-proclaimed demon-summoning wizard.
Niall MacGinnis plays the wizard brilliantly as a devilishly soft-spoken, humorous scoundrel who dresses up like a clown to throw Halloween parties for local children, then turns around and claims to summon violent wind storms and killer demons on anyone who gets in his way.
It’s great to see a movie that feels like a classic Universal monster flick shot not on limited sets, but in big, beautiful, real locations like a massive London library, dark country roads and forests, foggy city streets, a rambling country manor and even Stonehenge itself. The cinematography is gloriously crisp, the lighting is pure noir, and the visual effects are excellent. A must watch this Halloween!
Scary Movie Mini Review #10: Possum (2018)
Directed by Matthew Holness
A miserably lonely middle-aged man returns to his half-ruined childhood home in the late autumn. He’s a puppeteer, you see, but his latest act was so bizarre and frightening that he’s been publicly shunned, and his main goal now is to get rid of the horrific hand-made puppet that started it all. Or is it? Possum is a study in misery and fear with a disturbing mystery at the center. Why does the puppet keep coming back and who is the old man who lives in the puppeteer’s home? For all the sadness and grime and horror, there’s some redemption here too, and some solid visual storytelling.
Scary Movie Mini Review #11: Snowbeast (1977)
Directed by Herb Wallerstein
There’s plenty of snow in this Jaws rip-off, just not much beast, which is a shame because a quick Google image search shows the costume from this production, if not very realistic, was actually pretty cool. We almost never see it. Instead, we get what feels like hours of shaky POV shots from behind trees with poorly timed and constantly looping monster growls and overly dramatic music. Skiers ski past and the snowbeast watches them and growls and howls incredibly loudly but they never seem to hear him. It’s actually pretty hilarious.
Our human heroes work for a ski lodge owner who refuses to shut the lodge down after mysterious animal attacks because of the big skiing event and all the money it will bring in. Sound familiar? These doofuses then spend the rest of the movie snowmobiling around aimlessly in search of the beast. They do really dumb stuff like going out at night alone and dropping their guns in the snow right when they need them the most. Robert Logan Jr. delivers his lines with such random intonation and aggression, it has to be heard to be believed. He’s definitely the MVP in terms of laughs, but the scene at the end with the POV camera and the ski pole is probably the funniest thing in the movie. If you want some good laughs and don’t mind being bored out of your mind in between them, Snowbeast is for you.
Scary Movie Mini Review #12: The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020)
Directed by Jim Cummings
Writer/director Jim Cummings is great at playing angry for laughs, and he writes and directs a script here that gives him plenty of opportunity to show off this skill. Someone or something is killing young women in the sleepy mountain resort town of Snow Hollow, and Cumming’s character, who is the sheriff’s son, a cop, and secretly running the police department as his elderly father fades, has to single-handedly solve these murders as he deals with annoying townsfolk, clueless coworkers, dysfunctional family members and alcoholism. The movie does a good job juggling the tone of grisly murder and the humor of small town cops completely out of their element, bungling their way through investigating what could be the acts of an actual werewolf. Some of the humor doesn’t work and some scenes feels overly precious, but there are some nice emotional moments and a couple great twists. This is one of the better recent werewolf films.
Scary Movie Mini Review #13: Sometimes They Come Back (1991)
Directed by Tom McLoughlin
A man returns to his childhood town to teach and his students start getting bumped off one by one, replaced by the dead bullies from his past. Cue the battle between good and evil. Stephen King has written so many stories and had so many turned into movies that I didn’t even know this one existed until the other day. Think “It” if the evil shape-shifting clown was a psychotic 50’s greaser gang instead. You’ve got all the King hallmarks: childhood trauma, twisted nostalgia, a haunted small town and mindless, unstoppable, possibly cosmic evil. Everything is serviceable here but nothing feels more than that. Some of the scenes and images are striking, while others feel flat and uninspired. It’s a great idea for a story, it just doesn’t all quite hang together. Apparently the ending was rewritten to make it more tolerable for audiences. The original ending from King’s short story would not have played well! Only recommended for the King completionists.
Scary Movie Mini Review #14: Whistle and I’ll Come to You (1968)
Directed by Jonathan Miller
A stark black and white BBC adaptation of an M. R. James short story, Whistle and I’ll Come to You perfectly captures the paralyzing, gibbering fear of an intense nightmare. That it does this with a single character, a dull old professor muttering to himself and wandering around an empty country seaside for a couple days, is profound. It’s like this short film makes a bet that it can scare you with both its hands tied behind its back, and then it does. Simple, elegant, and unsettling.
Directed by Joel Anderson
Some people claim that this is the scariest film ever made. I wouldn’t go that far, but it is very, very effective at getting under your skin and staying there long after you finish watching it. A fake documentary, Lake Mungo is a series of interviews with a family who lost a daughter in a swimming accident a year prior, a daughter who then maybe started haunting their house? I say maybe because there are many twists and turns here, and nothing is what it first seems. Clearly inspired by the cult series Twin Peaks, Lake Mungo is about the secrets the daughter, winkingly named Alice Palmer, has been keeping from everyone in her life. These secrets, revealed through the interviews, family photos and home movie footage, culminate in a revelation that I’ve never encountered in any other story before. Its originality grabs ahold of the imagination and is hard to shake. Lake Mungo is an A+ ghost story and is beautifully put together. It may also royally creep you out.