This October, to celebrate Halloween, I’m writing 31 mini reviews of scary movies. Here are the final 16:
Scary Movie Mini Review #16: The Midnight Hour (1985)
Directed by Jack Bender
This 80s made-for-TV movie is a bit of everything: part Stephen King small town horror, part creature feature, part teen comedy, part… musical? Seeing LeVar Burton dance the Get Dead dance has to be seen to be believed. An ancient curse comes back to haunt a small New England town. Our teen heroes accidentally trigger this curse then have to resolve it on Halloween night, all while throwing a wild Halloween house party and dealing with an increasing hoard of zombies, vampires and ghosts. This is all way more fun than scary, think a Halloween version of the original Jumanji, and the 80s styles and zany makeup and costumes alone make it worth sitting through some of the more boring sections. The gravestones are made of flimsy wood, the wolf man looks more like a thin guy in an ape suit, the filmmakers can’t decide if the movie is set in the 80s or 50s—a good chunk of the movie is just pretending to be American Graffiti—but it’s still a lot of fun to watch and an endearing Halloween treat.
Scary Movie Mini Review #17: It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966)
Directed by Bill Melendez
The Peanuts comics by Charles M. Schulz present a cutely realistic, bittersweet world. Children in a parentless and sparse suburban environment make keen observations through gently humorous, often strangely sad and angry conversations. 1965’s A Charlie Brown Christmas perfectly encapsulated this world in animation, nailing the comic strip’s tone and voice and balance of sweet, funny and sad. A year later It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, the inevitable Halloween special, tried to capture this lightning in a bottle again. It didn’t really succeed. The vignettes are all cute and gently funny but don’t capture the essence of Halloween the same way the Christmas special captured the essence of a childhood Christmas.
Linus is convinced Santa is fake but the Great Pumpkin is real. Where he got this idea from isn’t explained, but his belief that this magical being values sincerity above all is a nice counterpoint to Charlie Brown’s disgust at the artificiality of Christmas in the previous special. Linus and Sally wait in a neighborhood pumpkin patch on Halloween night for the Great Pumpkin to appear while Charlie and company trick-or-treat and Snoopy imagines his dog house is a WW1 fighter plane.
There’s some nice retro Halloween imagery here, especially the spooky dreamlike imagery of floating Jack-o-lanterns, a black cat and skeletons in the intro. The sound design during the snoopy fighter pilot sequence is top notch, and the moody watercolor backgrounds are beautiful and effective, the French countryside scenes and the night skies with the big yellow moon, billowing clouds and stars. This is a nostalgic Halloween treat anyone can enjoy, it’s just a bit lesser than what came before.
Scary Movie Mini Review #18: Nope (2022)
Directed by Jordan Peele
The Haywood family’s Hollywood horse ranch has fallen on hard times after the sudden death of Otis, the Haywood patriarch. Otis’s adult son and daughter must pull together to make the ranch work again, but they quickly get sidetracked by something strange above their land: there’s a cloud there that doesn’t ever seem to move, and the horses are afraid of it.
Nope is a scary movie just dripping with Speilbergianism: the broken middle class California family, the encountering of the unknown in the commonplace, the team-up to pursue the unknown. Even Quint’s Jaws monologue is here, be it in a much sillier form. There was actually a moment in the third act where I forgot I was watching a new Jordan Peele movie and thought I was watching an old Speilberg one. But unlike many Spielberg films dealing with close encounters of the third kind, there’s a lot more menace in these skies.
Even though much of Nope feels like direct and obvious homage, there’s a lot of inventiveness here too: bizarre, dreamlike imagery, a nightmarish sequence in a darkened barn, a neo-western tone complete with heroic gallops across arid plains and last-minute show-downs, and a too-brief B plot about a very disturbing and unique moment in the past. Nope is kind of a mess but it’s also kind of genius, and it’s definitely a fun ride.
Scary Movie Mini Review #19: Werewolf By Night (2022)
Directed by Michael Giacchino
Disney was smart with this. Rather than trying to explain or build up to the horror corner of the Marvel comics universe, they just drop us into the deep end with this short special. In Werewolf by Night, six monster hunters compete for a magical stone, but some are not what they seem.
The tone is weird. This special is trying to be both the sweet and funny action/adventure Marvel we know and love while also lopping off arms and heads and ripping out guts. It walks a fine line by obscuring things in shadow and masking the blood with a black and white palette, but the moments of horrific violence still feel out of place.
Werewolf by Night is also trying to look like a classic 50s horror movie while using a modern aspect ratio and camera movements. It works way better than other movies that have tried this—I’m looking at you, Van Helsing—mostly because so many effect, including the werewolf, are gloriously practical, but I can’t help but wonder if emulating the 60s widescreen color aesthetic of Hammer horror films would have worked better. Regardless, it’s fun to see a black and white marvel show that’s a bit more realistic than the early episodes of WandaVision. I hope we get to see some of these characters again, but it’s Marvel, so of course we will.
Scary Movie Mini Review #20: Mr. Harrigan’s Phone (2022)
Directed by John Lee Hancock
An effective ghost story by way of mostly drama, Mr. Harrigan’s Phone tells the tale of a young man who’s rich mentor subtly haunts him after death. Donald Sutherland plays the rich mentor Mr. Harrigan with a mix of wit, menace and moments of softness, humanizing an otherwise hard and selfish old man. He was clearly villainous in his past yet truly values the time he gets to spend with his protege Craig, listening to him read old classics aloud. Craig buys Mr. Harrigan a cellphone and teaches him how to use it, and that’s where the trouble starts. After his mentor’s untimely death, Craig keeps leaving voice messages on Mr. Harrigan’s smartphone, messages that begin to be answered in unusual ways.
Aside from some ham-fisted voice over about fake news and the way cellphones help spread misinformation, this movie has some truly nuanced things to say about power and money, how both can be misused, and how those who misuse them aren’t always fully aware of what they’re doing and sometimes come to regret what they’ve done. I recommend this movie if you’re looking for an engaging drama with some spooky elements, but don’t expect to be too scared.
Scary Movie Mini Review #21:The American Scream (2012)
Directed by Michael Stephenson
The American Scream is a documentary filmed in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, featuring the endeavors of three families of house haunters preparing their houses for Halloween night. As the days tick down we follow Victor, a serious haunter who works closely with his wife and two kids to build an elaborate haunted house in his backyard, Manny, a semi-serious haunter who’s a little looser with his designs, and the Brodeurs, a unique father/son duo who try their best but fall a little short on the details. This is a sweet and funny doc, a wry look at suburban America and its slightly goofy ways. It also feels a bit like a time capsule, showing us a time in the late 2000s when middle class America had a bit more disposable income to mess around with. It’s a fun watch for both Halloween enthusiasts and those who enjoy observing human nature. There are some truly poignant emotional beats here, as well as a thoughtful take on the holiday. Victor observes late in the film that while Christmas and Thanksgiving are family holidays, Halloween is a holiday for the entire community to celebrate together, and that’s why he wants to be part of it.
Scary Movie Mini Review #22: Mad Monster Party (1967)
Directed by Jules Bass
Rankin/Bass, the same people who brought you Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, do the Universal monsters! The stop motion animation isn’t as good as Rudolph, but the scope of the sets and the amount of characters are impressive. You’ve got Dr. Frankenstein, the Frankenstein Monster, The Bride of the Monster, Dracula,the Wolf Man, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, the Gill-man, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, a horde of zombie bellhops, a rock band made up of wig-wearing skeletons, even a butler who looks and sounds like Peter Lorre. One gets the sense that Tartakovsky was heavily inspired by this movie when he made Hotel Transylvania.
Dr. Frankenstein is voiced by Boris Karloff and modeled after him too, which is a fitting tribute to the man who brought Frankenstein’s Monster to life on screen. The doctor gathers all the generic versions of the Universal monsters to his island for a mad monster party and to announce his successor. We get a series of humorous vignettes which are exactly what you’d expect from a satirical monster mash-up. There’s also wall-to-wall swinging 60s music and strangely out of place musical numbers, which get annoying quickly. The character and location designs are fun, but the writing is a bit flat. It’s still fun that this exists though!
Directed by Carlos Baeza
I remember watching this Simpsons Halloween special on TV as a kid in the early 90s. It was definitely a rerun, and it was airing the same Sunday afternoon as trick-or-treating. My family didn’t celebrate Halloween at the time, so we had the lights off upstairs and we were watching TV in the basement. The Simpsons was a bit racy for us then, and my Dad would only let us watch the show occasionally, and only if he watched it with us, so this was a special treat.
There are three short segments in this special: a riff on Child’s Play with an evil knife-wielding Krusty the Clown doll, a parody of King Kong, and a farcical zombie apocalypse set in Springfield. I remember thinking it was hilarious that the Homer version of King Kong ate Shirley Temple because he thought she was candy, and the zombie apocalypse segment was a revelation to me.
I don’t think I even knew what zombies were at the time, and the fact that they ate brains was both scary and intriguing and funny, especially when the zombies didn’t want to eat Homer’s brain because he had none. Other moments that I still remember laughing at to this day were when Homer shot the zombie version of Ned Flanders and then admitted he didn’t know Ned was a zombie, and when Homer shoots zombie George Washington and shouts “take that, zombie George Washington!” The combination of a horror concept so scary with scenes that were so silly felt like the most genius comedic thing I had ever seen, and I spent weeks trying to describe all the funny bits to my friends. This Simpsons episode is very nostalgic to me and probably one of the reasons I like Halloween so much.
Scary Movie Mini Review #24: Viy (1967)
Directed by Konstantin Yershov and Georgi Kropachyov
Here’s something unique: a horror film made in communist Russia. Viy is 1967 Soviet film based on a Russian folktale, and we’re told by a narrator during the opening credits that it hasn’t been changed in any way from the original telling. Setting the story firmly in folklore was apparently a loophole to get the horror imagery past the censors.
On vacation from seminary, a priest-in-training gets lost on his way home and ends up kind of accidentally killing the daughter of a nobleman. Long story. Before she dies, she requests, without revealing his guilt, that her killer be the one who prays over her body for three whole nights. The priest tries everything to get out of it, wracked with fear that he’ll be caught for what he’s done, but he can’t escape.
Each night he’s locked in the old church with the young woman’s dead body, and each night is crazier than the last. I won’t spoil anything here, but let’s just say that there are some wildly inventive visual effects. Think the Exorcist meets Ray Harryhausen. The church set is gorgeous, as are all the production values. There’s also an engaging mystery and a surprising amount of laughs. A very nice looking version of the film with subtitles is free on YouTube as we speak.
Scary Movie Mini Review #25: Alligator (1980)
Directed by Lewis Teague
Here’s a creature feature that’s just plain fun! A little girl wins an alligator at a state fair, but her parents flush it down the toilet. Decades later, the alligator is still down there, and has grown to an unnatural size due to an uncouth chemical lab dumping dead test animals in the sewer. City workers start to go missing and all the cops can find are floating body parts.
What could have been a paint-by-numbers Jaws rip-off is made way more fresh and fun by writer John Sayles, who injects a whole lot of wackiness, charm and originality into the characters and plot twists. When Robert Forster, the fed-up cop who’s sensitive about his balding, can’t get the police chief to act, he quits his job on the force and says “I’m gonna go out there, I’m gonna find that alligator, and I’m gonna kick its ass.” The effects are cheap but look great, and we get to see plenty of ridiculous alligator attack action, even in bright sunlight. Have you ever seen a giant alligator attack a fancy lawn party? It also may have one of the most exciting endings I’ve seen in a movie like this. Quentin Tarantino claims the role Robert Forster plays in his film Jackie Brown is actually just an older version of the character he plays in Alligator. Works for me!
Scary Movie Mini Review #26: Twice-Told Tales (1963)
Directed by Sidney Salkow
The opening card reads “a trio of terror!” This 1963 horror anthology features three scary stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne in glorious technicolor. Each story features Vincent Price in a role, and he narrates all three as well. A skeleton hand turns the pages of the book to each new story, a goofy but nice touch.
Story one concerns two aging friends who discover a source of water that brings youth to the drinker. Things don’t go as planned. Story two is a kind of Garden of Eden riff, with a father imposing some unique limitations on his daughter in an attempt to keep her from temptation. Things don’t go as planned. Story three is the House of Seven Gables, a Hawthorne classic. The last of the Pyncheon male heirs returns to his family’s haunted house to find a secret vault before he’s killed by a vengeful ghost. Things don’t go as planned.
The art design and lighting are good, but the locations are limited to small sets that don’t look very realistic. Nevertheless, the drama works and the stories are engaging enough. There’s a deep melancholy and twistiness to these tales that kept me engaged even through long scenes of dialogue and exposition. Price is peerless at getting you to sympathize with him even when he plays the villain, and all three of his performances in this movie are understated yet arresting.
Scary Movie Mini Review #27: Wendigo (2001)
Directed by Larry Fessenden
This super indie horror film has a wonderfully messy, handmade texture to it. Filmed on 16mm with minimal lighting in the winter woods, there are tons of haunting scenes filled with dark crushed-black shadows and cold blue winter light.
A young family drive to a small house in the Catskills for a winter weekend getaway. On the way they accidentally hit a buck being chased by hunters. One of the hunters is not pleased. The young son begins to see haunting visions of the deer they hit. A Native American man tells him about the wendigo, an angry forest spirit that consumes everything. Something evil is afoot.
The style here is striking: sped up frame rates, stop-motion and long exposure time-lapses paired with quick cuts to closeups of both everyday and dream-like imagery grab you and keep your eyes glued to the screen. The mundane and the surreal live side by side in Wendigo and sometimes seem interchangeable. This film grabbed me and made me want to see more of Fessenden’s work.
Scary Movie Mini Review #28: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)
Directed by Dwight H. Little
The original Halloween is my favorite horror movie and one of the best in my opinion. Halloween 2 is an interesting if not as great continuation of the story, and Halloween 3 is a unique departure that tells a stand-alone story. Halloween 4 returns us to the original story and is set (and filmed) ten years after the events of Halloween 1 and 2. We open on a dark and stormy night. Of course the police have to move the masked killer Michael Myers from one psychiatric ward to another, of course he escapes, and of course he goes right back to his hometown and gets right back to stabbin’ people.
Myers is targeting his bloodline, this time his niece. No reason is given, and I preferred the original Myers who was just evil personified and had no motive in his murder. Parts 2 and 3 upped the ante on gore, so I was a bit worried about this entry being too violent for my taste, but similar to the original, most of the violence happens off screen and is only hinted at. The director definitely seems to be trying to channel the vibe of the original Halloween.
It’s interesting that even with a much larger budget, larger cast and more elaborate sets and locations, Halloween 4 fails to capture the suspense or scope of the original. This goes to show just how much of a genius John Carpenter was and is. With the original Halloween, he managed to create something truly culture-changing and even mythic out of a tiny budget, a couple not-so-great kid actors and a few suburban streets. Directors have been unsuccessfully trying to recapture that magic with Halloween sequels ever since.
Scary Movie Mini Review #29: Baghead (2008)
Directed by Jay Duplass and Mark Duplass
I unapologetically enjoy mumblecore movies, a genre with its roots in the early 2000s indie scene that involves young people mostly talking. These are super low budget character studies often shot on 16mm or video that are loosely scripted or improvised altogether. Baghead is in a way a parody of this genre, as well as a parody of horror in general, or a “mumblegore” as some jokingly refer to it.
In Baghead, four young struggling actors go to a cabin in the woods to make a movie. Chad just wants to flirt with Michelle, who just wants to be friends with Chad and likes Matt, who isn’t sure if this movie project or his rocky relationship with Catherine is going to work. Michelle has what seems to be a dream about a stalker with a bag on his head, which inspires the group to write a horror film. Unfortunately, no one knows what they’re doing, and someone seems to be watching them from the forest.
The style of improvisational, talky filmmaking in this movie can be uniquely effective. There are some truly beautiful emotional moments here, seemingly torn out of thin air, that make an impact. There are also a lot of awkward bits that don’t work. Such is mumblecore. Baghead starts out intentionally cringey, so much so that I found it hard to watch initially, but by the end I had become deeply invested in these characters and legitimately creeped out by their increasingly frightening travails. If you can get past the mumblecore-ness of this movie, it’s a fun little thriller and a rewarding viewing experience.
Scary Movie Mini Review #30: The Exorcist III (1990)
Directed by William Peter Blatty
The Exorcist III Is a wild and unexpected sequel. I’d finally seen the original Exorcist a couple years ago and appreciated it for its dramatic qualities and good defeating evil storyline, though I found its effects a bit excessive and distasteful, which I guess is kind of the point: demons are unpleasant. The Exorcist III takes the story in an unexpected direction: a series of bizarre serial killings begin occurring around Washington, D.C. with no single set of fingerprints on the bodies. Also, the details of the killings match exactly the work of a serial killer who died 15 years before. George C. Scott plays the Police Lieutenant on the case with wit, vigor and deep emotion. He’s a joy to watch and makes the whole movie work.
For a movie about brutal serial killings there’s surprisingly almost zero gore here. The scariness is instead found in bodies hidden under sheets, clinical descriptions of the violence by police officers, and surreal dream sequences that Scott’s character keeps having when a new murder occurs. There’s also a pretty amazing single take jump scare that has to be seen to be believed. This is a great whodunnit and a confounding supernatural mystery. There’s maybe a bit too much expositional dialog, but it’s done mostly by Brad Dourif, who knows how to make monologues shine. I never thought I’d say this, but I really like The Exorcist III.
Scary Movie Mini Review #31: The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez
The Blair Witch Project was a revelation to me when I saw it on VHS in high school. It tapped into everything I loved about scary storytelling, from the colorful autumnal forest setting to the homespun folklore backdrop to the supernatural horror slowly breaking its way into the mundane. It reminded me of my favorite short stories set in the American backwoods by authors like Blackwood and Lovecraft. I later learned to appreciate the combination of lo-fi color VHS footage and hi-fi black and white 16mm film. The movie is never what you would call “well filmed,” and this is intentional, but the grain, color and textures created by these two mediums are exquisite together. The movie feels warm and cold and crunchy and very, very real.
But what I most appreciate about The Blair Witch Project is its ending, one of my favorite horror endings ever. Technically it’s perfect and so unique, with the source of audio only coming from one of the two POV cameras, so when we switch from the VHS camera with a mic to the film camera without one, the person carrying the film camera sounds far off, even as we watch from their POV. It’s scary and bewildering and grabs you. I also like that the ending isn’t explained, that the first act gives you multiple folklore monsters and the last act leaves it up to you to decide which monsters were responsible. As a small-time indie filmmaker, I’ve been chasing the texture, style and mystery of The Blair Witch Project my entire career. Maybe someday I’ll capture something a hundredth as genius.