Greetings, horror lovers!
Once I’d completed the 100 Horror Movies in 92 Days Challenge, I kept watching films because … I like them. But as the challenge was ongoing (until 31 Oct), I counted my new-to-me horror films towards the challenge as well, so here are the bonus films!
I’ll throw in some horror shows I’ve watched as well which don’t count, as they aren’t movies, but they are new to me and worth a watch.
Halloween Listen-along
I usually rewatch a few versions of Dracula, and I did a listen-along of the 1931 version on my podcast a coupe of years ago. If you want to listen along with my commentary, feel free to join in.
Halloween Special – 1931 Dracula Listen-Along
·31 OCTOBER 2021
Shows
I had already seen The Haunting of Hill House (2018), but hadn’t watched the other Mike Flanagan created series. I started Midnight Mass and never finished it, and same with Bly Manor. So, I’ve now completed The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020), with its bizarre parody of Englishness (the RP accented local copper was the weirdest thing about that show), and The Fall of the House of Usher (2023). I did enjoy both of these.
I will go for Midnight Mass as my next show.
My Fave Series Rec
My favourite show at the moment, though, is YARATILAN / Creature (2023), created, written and directed by Çağan Irmak. If you’re looking for a new version of Frankenstein that really does something fun with the material while still being faithful (in its own way) to the story, this is absolutely something for your watchlist.
It’s an 8-part series based on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, transposed into an Islamic context in Ottoman Turkiye. If you want mad science in the time of cholera, necromancy with alchemy, astrology, riddles and galvanism, and the most heart-wrenching Drama dialled up to 11, this is it. This is the one. Easily my favourite adaptation just because it’s from a different perspective and using different theology and philosophy to explore the story, and I love that fresh approach to a very familiar plot.
This adaptation gives us the framed narrative on the icy slopes of a Turkish mountain, where a group of treasure hunters, seeking the hidden gold of a Byzantine prince and led by Captain Ömer, rescue Ziya from the snows and nurse him to health while he tells his story. Ömer is the Walton equivalent, and Ziya, whose name means “light”, is the Frankenstein character, the seeker of illumination and a way to prevent death. He is guilt-ridden after his exploits with a certain machine and forbidden knowledge from the Book of Resurrection. In this version, it is the raising of a dead man, not creating a man from animal and human body parts, that is the central issue, as the theology here is Islamic and so the discourse and themes are transposed into this context. The series does a lot with the original novel, and develops and adapts scenes that usually don’t get a lot of screen time (if any). It takes a few liberties while also nodding to the original storyline.
I can see myself re-watching this, for sure.
If you like this and enjoy adaptations, you might also like GOGOL (2017-2019) dir. Egor Baranov, a film series turned into an 8-part show based on the work of Nikolai Gogol (the titular character). GOGOL is a fantasy-horror show/film series loosely based on stories in the collection Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka. It is more in the vein of the Poe films where Poe is the central character living through inspiration for his writing, like The Pale Blue Eye (2022), or The Raven (2012), but with a gritty, rural, Gothic atmosphere. I have re-watched this a couple of times, and it’s definitely on my Hallowe’en re-watch list for this year, too.
And now… for the films!
- CAVEAT (2020) dir. Damien McCarthy: I really enjoy Irish horror, and this was a really creepy, low budget indie film that plays with the haunted house trope. Lots of dark secrets and family tensions abound.
*** - HARUM MALAM/Blood Flower (2022) dir. Dain Said: Malay horror with younger protags, and the child’s eye-view really makes for uncomfortable watching as you start to work out what’s going on, and the reasons for the haunting and possessions. I really enjoyed this. If you like jinn AND ghosts in your horror: why choose.
*** - OLDER GODS (2023) dir. David A. Roberts: Set in Wales, but without anything identifiably Welsh to classify it properly as Welsh horror/Welsh Gothic. The suicides hanging from a creepy tree (all cult members who are active across the world and tracking the protagonist/his friend) did unpleasantly remind me of the (real life) suicide cluster in Bridgend, motives still unexplained, about which a film was made a few years after, using the town’s name as the title. In this case I don’t think that was the intention, but the association was automatic.
*** - DEATH LINE (1972) dir. Gary Sherman: Terror on the London Underground, using the trope of cannibals who live in the deserted tunnels and forgotten, disused stations of the sprawling network, coming out at night to pick off unwary commuters. Donald Pleasance is the unpleasant, jaded policeman dealing with it all, and there is an unpleasant young American student who sort of is the hero, and his lovely English girlfriend who is the damsel in distress but also possibly the only decent human being in the whole film. Except the cannibals, just trying to live.
*** - THE OPEN HOUSE (2018) dir. Matt Angel, Suzanne Coote: One of those I’d sort of meant to watch a while ago, and it was fine I guess. The premise is straightforward and puts itself in the same category as The Strangers for random house terror, but also has elements of Creepy Community, Is This A Set Up, and They’re Inside The House tropes. It centres the broken mother-son relationship, which is not so much healed as presented with additional trauma to unite them, and nothing is really resolved there so much.
*** - THE BLOCK ISLAND SOUND (2020) dir. Kevin McManus, Matthew McManus: I really enjoyed this. USA SciFi/EcoHorror, with a great family core and central focus on fishing / traumatising sea life in pursuit of research aims. I really liked the small close-knit community feel, the islanders vs mainlanders dynamics, and the whole premise worked for me.
*** - THE VAMPIRE LOVERS (1970) dir. Roy Ward Baker: An adaptation of Le Fanu’s Carmilla, with a hot, haughty lesbian whose type is wide-eyed pillow princesses. It’s your typical vampire male-gaze tits-out sapphic romp with angst and melodrama, and I enjoyed it.
*** - THE SHRINE (2010) dir. Jon Knautz: This was honestly a bit forgettable for me. The masks and human sacrifice was like The Torture Chamber of Dr Sadism (1967), with a bit of The Devil’s Men (1967), a good year for people getting offed in weird sacrificial ways. It’s another ‘Eastern Europeans do bad things to American tourists’, and is a bit folk horror… but honestly, if that’s what you want, Vampir (2021) absolutely nailed it (with bonus vampires).
*** - THE VELVET VAMPIRE (1971) dir. Stephanie Rothman: The polyamorous quad that never was, with unrealised sapphic repressed desire. The fact it’s set in a desert is the vampire film twist I wasn’t ready for. There was such a lot going on in this film. Honestly, though, I preferred Jean Rollin’s Fascination (1979), where the main girl offs both her lovers (m & f) and gets her vampire cult girlboss.
*** - TALES THAT WITNESS MADNESS (1973) dir. Freddie Francis: An anthology horror, where I liked 3 out of the 4 stories. I really liked the boy and his imaginary (OR IS IT) tiger, the sight of Joan Collins getting tit-spanked by an angry tree, and the concept of a haunted penny farthing with timey-wimey stuff. The 4th one just went full anti-indigenous with the “Hawaiian natives are cannibals” trope, and a (white) British woman made to eat her own daughter at a culturally-appropriative luau for exclusively white people (barring the 2 native characters), which includes the musicians etc. The framing narrative is your basic “is the psychiatrist insane or is he right” with the basic reveal at the end.
*** - THE NUN II (2023) dir. Michael Chaves: I had forgotten the whole plot of THE NUN and so didn’t realise who the caretaker, Maurice, or Sister Irene, even were. But it all started coming back to me and it operated very much like Errementari (2017) or Kuntilanak (2018) or Mata Batin 2/The Third Eye 2 (2019), with the child’s perspective at the boarding school. The ending was inspired – I should have seen it coming but given that I was so tired that I got confused about where different characters were for the first half of the film, I’m amazed I was on the ball enough to notice anything.
*** - زیر سایه / Under The Shadow (2016) dir. Babak Anvari: Set during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, a missile hits a Tehran apartment building but doesn’t explode – but may have brought with it something ancient and evil. Or perhaps the traumatised boy who came to stay with relatives has brought something with him. Or perhaps it’s all trauma. A tense supernatural horror that was a really hard watch given the current unfolding situation in Gaza.
*** - I SEE YOU (2019) dir. Adam Randall: In the vein of The Open House (2018), and Aftermath (2021), with police procedural thrown in. I actually watched this much earlier in the challenge and thought it only counted as a thriller, not a horror, so I didn’t list it. But now I see that ‘Horror’ has been added to its genre on Letterboxd (a condition of the challenge – it has to be classed as ‘Horror’ on Letterboxd / IMDb to count). So I’m adding it in here, now. This is another broken family who struggle with the aftermath of the breakage, and there’s a fair bit of implied CSA in the child abduction plot.
Thanks for Reading!
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