The Dunwich Horror opens with titles so sweeping and swanky and groovy they could’ve come straight out of a James Bond movie, all swirling psychedelic Op Art animation and bewitching theme music that apparently won the film some praise (I looked it up later and discovered it was composed by Les Baxter). We meet Wilbur Whateley (Dean Stockwell with shaggy curly hair and a commitment to playing ’70s occultist creeper), who wants to get his hands on the Necronomicon so he can open a portal and bring back the Old Ones. He meets college student Nancy Wagner (Sandra Dee) at the Miskatonic University library, and she immediately trusts him because of his eyes, which – if you ask me – are exceedingly creepy. I think she’s a very bad judge of character. Oh, Nancy.
Nancy lets Wilbur read from the forbidden book until her professor, Dr. Armitage, interrupts and discovers Wilbur is a Whateley, as in, descended from the Oliver Whateley who was publicly hanged in Dunwich’s town square for unsavory occult goings-on. Somehow, this leads to an awkward dinner where Wilbur charms everyone, then conveniently “misses his bus” home, and Nancy offers to drive him all the way back to Dunwich despite every single creepy-eyed red flag waving in her face.
He invites her back to his colorful gothic mansion for tea. (Don’t drink the tea. The tea is drugged, Nancy!) What’s particularly hard to watch is that, early on, when Nancy is alone with Wilbur, her nervousness and hesitation are palpable, telegraphed in every look and gesture. She doesn’t want to drive him home. She doesn’t want to go inside the house. She doesn’t want to stay for tea. She doesn’t want to freshen up in the bathroom. But she does all of it anyway, out of what all women know too well that ingrained need to be polite, to not make a scene, to override every instinct screaming at you because you don’t want to seem rude or difficult.
And then Wilbur drugs her tea a whole bunch, and she spends the rest of the movie in a hazy stupor, moaning suggestively while lying on a cliffside altar waiting to be sacrificed, plagued by nightmares of orgiastic hippie people who are presumably the Old Ones? Actually, there’s a lot of uncomfortable suggestive moaning in this movie – Lavinia giving birth in the opening, Lavinia gibbering in her padded cell at the asylum, Sandra Dee drugged on the altar. It all felt really creepy, in an extra-gross sort of way.
The film does have atmosphere on its side. The eerie seaside town filmed at night with its whistling wind feels properly unsettling. The jarringly psychedelic film-negative sequences showing the monster’s POV, complete with thudding heartbeat and inhuman breathing, are actually kind of freaky. The whippoorwills catching the souls of the departed is a nice Lovecraftian touch.
But the pacing is glacial, especially once you realize what’s happening, and we’re just waiting for the inevitable sacrifice. By the time we get to the rushed ending where Dr. Armitage shows up and defeats Wilbur, mostly by yelling at him until he bursts into flames, I’d already mostly stopped paying attention.
The whole thing is mired in a sloggy lethargy that mirrors Sandra Dee’s drugged state, and despite the psychedelic visuals and occult aesthetic, the execution just never lands. I found myself mocking Wilbur as he chanted. “SLOG-sothoth!” Hehehehehe.
And that’s 31 Days of Horror! Today is Halloween, and we are headed to my brother-in-law’s tonight. We’re having a little finger-food buffet (I am making these Red Devil Meatballs; my Feet-Loaf suggestion was soundly rejected), and I believe we are watching Love At First Bite. Which isn’t a horror film at all, but aside from me, this isn’t exactly a horror crowd. However! When I was 6 years old, in 1982, staying overnight with my aunt and uncle in their apartments that sat on top of a funeral home, they put a movie on, and it scared the crap out of me. I ran out of room and started crying! That movie was Love At First Bite, and along with the Scooby Doo monsters, it was one of the very first things that scared me. I am looking forward to finally facing it again!
Thanks as always for following along with this annual horror-viewing tradition! And because I always overindulge, I urge you to check back in tomorrow for one last 31 Days Of Horror bonus post…!
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Rest Stop is Nat Cassidy doing something a little different, or at least it felt that way to me. Abe is driving through the night to visit his dying grandmother (whom he resents) and stops at a gas station to use the bathroom. He gets locked in. There’s a masked man outside. There are spiders and snakes crawling down the walls inside. There are notes being slipped under the door. His grandmother’s voice keeps running through his head, all her stories about Jewish trauma and suffering, all the ways she made him feel small. The whole thing is claustrophobic and visceral and moves at a breakneck pace, and Abe talks to himself constantly in a way that some people apparently found annoying but I thought worked perfectly for someone losing their mind in a gas station bathroom at 3am.
People keep calling this “extreme horror” and I don’t know about that. It’s gory, sure. There’s a lot of blood and some genuinely upsetting body horror. But it doesn’t feel like it’s trying to punish you the way actual extreme horror does. It felt more like Cassidy was having fun in the playground of his genre, seeing how much weirdness and violence and dark humor he could pack into 160 pages. Some reviewers found it cringe or too existential or didn’t understand the ending, and I get all of that. It’s definitely weird. But I had a blast with it. It’s quick and wacky and unhinged in ways I wasn’t quite expecting from him. This man could write about possessed dental equipment or a haunted Burger King drive-thru or demonic hitchhikers on the Garden State Parkway, and I’d be first in line for it, every single time.
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Welcome to Derry opens with a kid hitchhiking out of town who gets picked up by what seems like a nice family. Except the family is not nice at all. They’re deeply weird and getting weirder by the second, and the tension keeps ratcheting up until the mother gives birth to a CGI demon baby right there in the moving vehicle. It’s disturbing and gross until that baby sprouts wings and starts zooming around the car like a demented bat, at which point the whole thing just becomes corny as hell.
Four months later, we meet a group of kids investigating their missing friend Matty, plus there’s this whole separate storyline about a Black Air Force pilot dealing with racism on a secretive military base in 1962 Derry. The kids have visions, hear voices coming through the pipes in their houses, and end up at a movie theater where the demon baby is back for round two, and it kills three of them (just as we were getting to know them! dang!)
I have no idea what this show is actually about yet. There’s the kids’ story, there’s the military conspiracy thread, there’s Pennywise presumably lurking somewhere (though he’s barely in this episode, if at all?), and none of it connects in any way that makes sense. The demon baby looked ridiculous. The writing overall isn’t great. Masked men attack a soldier on a military base to steal secrets and then just… leave when his buddy shows up with a pipe? And nobody calls security? The guy doesn’t even shut his door? But I liked these kids anyway, maybe because I already have a built-in fondness for King’s kid characters. That ending surprised me – killing off most of the kids we’d just spent an hour with was unexpected and brutal.
I’ll probably stick around to see where this is headed, unless I forget about it entirely and never watch it again, which happens 99% of the time. (For example, I still haven’t watched episode two of Alien Earth, ha!)
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I had grand plans for a folk horror summer that never quite materialized. Suddenly, it was October, and it turns out I’m having a folk horror fall instead, which kinda feels more appropriate anyway. Stories about harvest festivals and pagan rituals and things lurking in the countryside feel right for autumn. (See Wake Wood, Watcher in the Woods, The Vourdalak, Exhuma, etc.)
Rebecca Holland is a newly appointed vicar trying to settle into a small English village with her husband, Henry, and daughter, Grace. The village celebrates an annual harvest festival centered around Gallowgog, an ancient harvest deity who either blesses crops or ruins them depending on how properly he’s been honored. When Grace goes missing during the festival, Rebecca discovers that the entire village knows something she doesn’t, and nobody seems particularly interested in helping her find her daughter. Jocelyn Abney (Ralph Ineson, who is magnificent and ominous as always) reveals that his own child disappeared years ago under similar circumstances, and he’s strangely at peace with it. The police are useless. Her neighbors are evasive. Everyone’s chanting and wearing animal masks and standing menacingly in fields, and Rebecca is running out of time.
A lot of reviewers hated this movie. They found it boring, predictable, full of plot holes. And…they’re not wrong about the plot holes. There are moments where characters behave in ways that make no sense, where motivations feel murky or contradictory, where you can see exactly where things are going from a mile away. But I don’t care. Folk horror doesn’t need to reinvent itself to work. Sometimes you just want atmospheric English countryside, creepy villagers who know too much, ritualistic chanting, and Ralph Ineson’s voice, gravelly and guttural. The film looks gorgeous, all misty fields and ancient stone and firelight, and wonderful cottages full of cozy rugs and pottery, and lots of fun rustic homemade pagan wards and offerings and totems and talismans and whatnot strung up all over the place. Also, Rebecca’s nails. During most of the film, they’re short and squared off, painted a sort of muted purply-greige. By the end? Long, sharp talons in oxblood purple-black. Because she serves the old ways now, you see!
Folk horror is one of my favorite subgenres, and Lord of Misrule understands what makes it work even when the script occasionally stumbles. All those isolated little communities with older allegiances than the ones we recognize, land that remembers things we’ve forgotten, what happens when ancient bargains come due. I really feel like this is where my sweet spot is, and if I could finish out the month with four more of these (even mediocre ones!) I totally would. But I like to mix things up! So I probably won’t!
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On Why I Did Not Watch Bring Her Back; Or, if there is a navel in which to gaze, I will plumb its goddamn depths. (Sorry about it, Leila!)
I’ve been having a stupid amount of anxiety about whether or not to watch a movie. Not life-altering anxiety, not “keeps me up at night” anxiety, but a persistent, gnawing discomfort that feels wildly disproportionate to the actual stakes. It’s a horror film. I could watch it, or I could not watch it. That should be the end of the decision. Except there’s this nasty little edgelord gatekeeper who lives somewhere deep in my heart, and he’s been working working real hard to make me feel like shit, insisting that real horror fans don’t get to be squeamish, that there are no safe words when it comes to the genre, that opting out means I’m a fraud.
The movie is Bring Her Back, the follow-up to Talk to Me by the Philippou brothers. It’s a grief story wrapped in a resurrection ritual with demons and possession and traumatized foster children caught in the middle. Sally Hawkins gives a performance that’s apparently devastating. I read the plot synopsis on Wikipedia, thinking maybe knowing what happens would make it easier to watch. It confirmed my instinct to pass. The thing is, if this were just schlock, I could dismiss it easily. But people whose opinions I respect are saying it’s great, emotionally resonant, beautifully crafted. That it earns its horror. And somehow that makes it worse, because skipping a well-crafted, emotionally intelligent horror film feels like admitting I can’t handle what the genre is capable of at its best. Like I only want horror when it’s safely in the realm of fantasy, when it’s vampires and monsters and things that don’t exist. Not when it’s about the actual horrors people inflict on each other, especially on children.
I’ve spent years forcing myself to watch things because I thought that’s what being a serious horror fan required. I sat through films that left me feeling wrung raw and emotionally eviscerated (Martyrs, Irreversible, A Serbian Film, Funny Games, etc.) because I didn’t want to seem fragile or squeamish. I pushed through content that made me miserable because I was afraid of being dismissed as someone who couldn’t handle it. And maybe some of that was useful, expanding my tolerance and understanding of what horror can do. But a lot of it was just needless punishment, this idea that suffering through something proves your dedication to the genre. Like horror fandom is a test of endurance rather than a love of storytelling. But I’ve gotten tired of treating horror like something I have to survive. Somewhere along the way I forgot I’m supposed to actually enjoy this, and I don’t want my horror to feel punitive anymore. As a friend observed on Facebook, “we don’t have to continually poke the tender spots.” Amen.
There’s probably something gendered in this anxiety too. Women in horror spaces often feel like we have to prove we can handle anything, that we’re not “too sensitive” or easily shocked. We can’t be the ones who look away or cover our eyes or admit that something was too much. That confirms every stereotype about women being weak or unsuited for the genre. So we perform toughness, we laugh at things that aren’t funny, we act unbothered when we’re very much bothered. And maybe I’ve been doing that for so long that I’ve forgotten it’s okay to just… not.
I write about horror publicly. On my blog, in my reviews (whether what I am reviewing is horror-related or not!), and I even have a little column in a horror magazine now. I’ve built some kind of authority, however teeny tiny, on my ability to engage with the genre thoughtfully. And there’s this fear that admitting I won’t watch something undermines that authority. Like, I lose credibility, like people will question whether I’m qualified to write about horror if I’m picking and choosing what I can handle. But that’s the edgelord talking again, insisting that real expertise means consuming everything indiscriminately, that boundaries are weakness. And you may be tempted to say “Sarah, it’s not that deep,” to which I would invite you to fuck off because I hate it when people say that. It is that deep. It is always that deep.
So I’m not watching Bring Her Back, at least not right now. Not during October when I’m already watching or reading or listening to something horror-related every single day and writing about it immediately afterward. As someone who’s more of a reader than a movie watcher, this much screen time is exhausting. And I’m already doing so much in general in terms of blogs, reviews, magazine columns, books (in additon to my day job I’ve had for twenty years, which is a fraught situation unto itself because there’s a TBD expiration date on it); work that never feels like enough, no matter how much I produce. I can’t feel okay without creating, but oftentimes creating doesn’t actually make me feel okay either. It’s an impossible trap.
Maybe that’s what this anxiety is actually about. My mother and grandparents used to call me lazy and lackadaisical. They’re all dead now. They never saw any of the things I’ve accomplished, and they won’t see what I accomplish next. But I’m still trying to prove them wrong anyway, still measuring myself against voices that can’t hear me anymore. I will apparently be proving myself to the dead until I myself am dead. Maybe that gatekeeper living in my chest isn’t really about horror fandom at all. Maybe he’s just an echo of something older and even more devastating, a voice insisting that no matter what I accomplish, I’m still fundamentally shiftless, useless, and worthless.
Maybe I’ll watch this film eventually, or maybe I won’t. But for now, I’m giving myself permission to say not this one, not today!
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[Whoops, somehow posted this a day ahead of time again! Dangit! Oh well!]
I had a movie on my list that I’d been dreading, one of those films I felt obligated to watch as a “serious horror fan” but knew would leave me feeling scraped raw. Thinking about not watching it was stressing me out almost as much as thinking about actually going through with it! But life’s too short for trauma porn masquerading as art, so I bailed and put on The Monkey instead. I was stupidly worked up about this dilemma, and ultimately needed something goofy, something that might make me laugh.
The first three minutes are perfect. Adam Scott stumbles into a pawn shop, bloodied and desperate to get rid of a wind-up toy monkey, and before he can finish the transaction, the monkey triggers a brief, brutal wave of carnage. It’s absurd and shocking and sets up exactly what kind of movie this is aiming for. Then we jump back to meet twin brothers Hal and Bill as teenagers, discovering their dead father’s monkey in the attic and accidentally unleashing its power. Tatiana Maslany shows up as their mother, and she’s the only person in the entire film who seems like an actual human being. She’s irreverent and sharp and so good in her limited screen time that it makes you wish the whole movie had been about her instead. But she’s gone quickly, and what’s left is a parade of increasingly cartoonish deaths (heads exploding, bodies electrocuted in pools, the kind of Final Destination excess that’s fun the first few times and then just repetitive) strung together by characters who feel like sketches rather than people.
Theo James plays adult Hal and Bill after a time jump, and he’s too effortlessly handsome and composed to sell either version convincingly. Hal is supposed to be an anxious, absent father trying to reconnect with his son while being haunted by this cursed monkey, but James can’t quite shake his natural suave energy. Bill is supposed to be unhinged and bitter, blaming Hal for their mother’s death because Hal was born first and supposedly “ate more of the mother’s placenta”, which is actually kinda hilarious. But the movie never fully commits to being that kind of dark comedy. It can’t decide if it wants to lean into the ridiculous or explore generational trauma with any sincerity, so it ends up doing neither particularly well. I didn’t hate it, but I also couldn’t tell you much about the second half. It was fine. It made me chuckle a few times. That’s all I needed!
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In Wake Wood, a grisly tale of grief unfolds in the aftermath of a devastating loss. When their young daughter Alice is brutally killed by a dog, Patrick (played by Littlefinger), a veterinarian, and his wife Louise retreat to the Irish countryside, hoping distance might soften their unbearable pain. Nestled in a remote, rural pocket where wind turbines and old-world mysteries coexist, each casting long shadows over the other, they discover an extraordinary possibility: an ancient pagan ritual that can briefly return the dead, offering families three days to say a proper goodbye.
Peter Pettigrew is Arthur (sorry, but that’s how I best know this actor), a village elder familiar with the community’s hidden, ancient rhythms and traditions passed down through generations. When Arthur reveals the ritual that could momentarily restore their daughter, the couple sees a lifeline through their overwhelming grief. But grief makes desperate people careless, and they promptly and spectacularly ignore the ritual’s carefully maintained rules.
I felt for them, truly. But good grief, did they fuck things up. Their flagrant violation threatens an intricate system that has sustained this community for generations. This isn’t just about one grieving couple’s moment of weakness, it’s about shitting on a delicate social contract that has kept something ancient and dangerous at bay. Ooh, that made me so mad!
Though never gratuitous or grotesque, there are scenes that are definitely graphic and visceral – the brutal dog attack that kills Alice, the ritual’s gory preparation involving a recently deceased body, Alice’s final rampage through the village, and probably lots of other stuff too. There were a lot of carcasses, I guess it what I am saying. Just a small forewarning, if that bothers you. But for those drawn to horror that thrums with the pulse of ancient traditions and buried secrets, Wake Wood delivers a perfectly serviceable dark, twisted tale of grief and consequence.
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I have a deep and abiding fondness for stories where humans come face to face with the depths of the unknown and should-not-be-known. The ocean floor and deep space have always been perfect hunting grounds for this kind of existential dread. Think Event Horizon‘s hellish spaceship, Leviathan‘s mutating deep-sea creatures, or The Thing‘s parasitic alien infiltration. These are stories that understand the trespassing of somewhere we don’t belong, each explores the same terrifying question about what happens when human curiosity crests beyond the boundaries of safety and understanding. When someone whispers with that specific tremor of dread, “we’re not supposed to be here,” the words carry the raw electricity of human vulnerability. It’s a moment of existential recognition. Our fragile human consciousness brushes against something vast and incomprehensible. We are small. We are temporary. And somewhere in the darkness, something ancient and indifferent watches.
When author Ryan LaSala (The Honeys) posted about Underwater on Threads, sharing that, “I love this movie and I don’t think anyone has ever looked better in a film than Kristen Stewart and her little buzz cut and big oil rig worker jacket,” I thought, “huh.” But I saw that was in response to another post that this was a pretty good movie that came out five years ago, with an actual Cthulhu, and no one saw it. OK, now my interest was got! Intrigued by the promise of an overlooked cosmic horror, I dove in.
The film drops viewers immediately into chaos at a deep-sea drilling facility seven miles beneath the ocean’s surface. Kristen Stewart plays Norah, a mechanical engineer who becomes an unlikely survivor when the Kepler Station starts imploding around her. Pretty sure this happens not even ten minutes into the film, so it’s quite intense fairly early on. With escape pods gone and survival seeming impossible, she and a handful of other workers must trek across the ocean floor to another station, all while wearing pressurized suits that are barely designed for the journey.
What starts as a disaster film quickly becomes a creature feature, with the survivors discovering they’re not alone in the murky depths. The monsters are grotesque and menacing, with a finale that hints at something much larger and more terrifying lurking in the ocean’s unexplored regions. It’s a film that understands the primal fear of the unknown, moving at a breakneck pace with minimal character development but maximum tension.
I mentioned to Yvan that critics thought the film was derivative. He laughed and said, “The movie-going public loves ‘derivative’!” Hee hehehe, catty Yvan! But I don’t think he is wrong, his offhand comment spoke to how we return to the same narrative wells, finding comfort in tales that echo our deepest fears, in stories that remake our deepest anxieties with just enough variation to feel both strange and familiar. It feels true to me, anyway. I don’t know if this film was great, but I don’t care. I will always love a film like this.
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Some days we don’t have time or energy for full-length features, so we ferret out those little scraps of weirdness and ephemera that float across the bizarre wonderland of the internet. Today’s post is a grab bag of quick, bite-sized terrors: trailers, shorts, lists, and random video discoveries!
“Gacha Gacha” transforms the collectible joy of capsule toys into a twisted horror premise.
“Portrait of God” uses a school project as a vehicle for existential terror.
In “Other Side of the Box,” a seemingly cozy holiday moment turns horrific with the arrival of a gift.
Scooby Doo was my first foray into being scared and led to my love of horror! Here’s a bit of its history.
On Tasting History, a “very thirsty” chicken paprikash dish from Dracula! Which I am totally going to make.
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Michele Soavi’s The Church is a mess of medieval massacres and modern-day demonic possession, built on a premise that sounds far more compelling than its actual execution. The film opens with Teutonic Knights brutally slaughtering an entire village accused of devil worship, burying their bodies in a mass grave and constructing a massive cathedral directly over their corpses, a not-so-subtle metaphor about the Church’s historical violence and attempts to cover up its sins.
Enter Evan, the librarian who is late to work on his first day and immediately demonstrates he has no business being in this extraordinary job. When a woman is restoring a wild, Bosch-like fresco, he asks about her work, and her blasé “meh, it’s whatever” shrug in response, perfectly encapsulates how little these characters appreciate their uniquely weird positions. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life looking at old books,” Evan whines, which is hilarious coming from a medieval church librarian. Sir, what exactly did you think this job would entail?
The film traps a wonderfully absurd collection of visitors inside the church when demonic possession takes hold: a school group on an outing, two motorcyclists heading to a concert, a bridal magazine photo shoot, and a collection of random tourists. Among them, one particular elderly woman emerges as the film’s most delirious highlight. She chirps to her husband Heinrich about “groovy biscuits” and drags him up some obscure stairs with a gleeful “I have a FAB idea!” Somehow, Heinrich loses his head (how exactly? The film never quite explains), and suddenly she’s enthusiastically bonging the church bell using his decapitated head.
Meanwhile, baby-faced Asia Argento, who looks about 10 but is sneaking out to clubs and hanging with older boys, adds another layer of weirdness to this already bizarre narrative. As the church’s self-defense mechanism activates, the film becomes a psychedelic hallucination of Italian horror, with the Goblin score and wild visual setpieces barely holding together a narrative that feels like a nightmare projected through a kaleidoscope of blood and baroque architecture. It’s the kind of Italian horror that’s infinitely more interesting to discuss than to actually watch, with its convoluted plot about an ancient evil waiting to be unleashed, jumbled references to historical trauma, and absolutely zero logic.
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