Let's Scare Chad

  Name :  The Old Ways Directed   By : Christopher Alender    Subgenre : Supernatural Series :  Spooktober 2021 entry #24; review #117 Review : The Old Ways is an exorcism movie. You know the type: someone, for some reason, gets possessed by an evil spirit and it takes a spiritual practitioner's expertise to drive out the baleful presence. The particular subgenre thrust itself onto the horror scene by everyone's favorite pea-soup-spewing little girl in The Exorcist , and tales of demons, devils, and other overly-clingy spirits have been popping up every few years lock clockwork. Every now and again, there are attempts to subvert expectations-- The Taking of Deborah Logan and The Last Exorcism come to mind--but the vast majority of the films revolve around a pair of Catholic priests working their particular brand of magic spiritual business against evil spirits that are evil because, to paraphrase the sage Stefani Germanotta: they were born that way. ...

  Name :  The Brain Directed   By : Barry Pearson   Subgenre : Creature Feature Series :  Spooktober 2021 entry #23; review #116 Review : The Brain is quintessentially 80's schlock, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. The film follows our main lad as he slowly starts to uncover an insidious plot to brainwash folks from his town and, eventually, the world! He eventually faces off against Dr. Blakely, a psychologist who's mad with power after coming in contact with an alien entity that's so psychic it's literally just a big ass brain. Dr. Blakely uses his televised self-help program, ironically called Independent Thinkers, as a medium for his brain-child to send out psychic frequencies to all who watch and turn them into mind-controlled puppets. The Brain, as you might imagine, is squarely a creature feature, with lots of fairly interchangeable scenes of the giant brain eating people or using tentacle-based hallucinations to cause people to accidentally...

  Name :  Superdeep (alternatively, The Superdeep) Directed   By : Arseny Syuhin   Subgenre : Creature Feature, Body Horror Series :  Spooktober 2021 entry #22; review #115 Review : I've probably mentioned it before, but John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) is my favorite horror movie of all time. In the horror fandom, this also makes me something of a basic bitch. That is to say, it's not a very unique opinion. The Thing is pushing 40 years old at this point but it still remains a genre favorite for generations of horror fans because it managed to blend together so many perfect elements: a research crew is stranded in a hostile environment (the Arctic) when something truly monstrous starts to pick them off one by one; tensions rise and fall throughout the film, and that rollercoaster ride of anxiety is only exacerbated by Carpenter's minimalist score and the absolutely mind-blowing creature designs and effects that still hold up to this day. In the decades ...

  Name :  Funhouse Directed   By : Jason William Lee   Subgenre : Thriller Series :  Spooktober 2021 entry #21; review #114 Review : If you've been online--and, more specifically, on Netflix--in the last month or so (circa September-October 2021), then you've probably heard of South Korea's sensational Squid Game . To say that it's taken the streaming world by storm is, frankly, underselling just how big of an impact the show has made. While it's not necessarily planted in the horror genre, the series still has some horror-adjacent moments. And it's good! It's really good! But, I'm not here to add yet another voice to the pile about that particular series--though, if you did like Squid Game , then you might also enjoy Japan's Alice in Borderland given their similar stories even if they don't share much of the underlying themes. I bring up the series because it's another entry into the subgenre of "people stuck in [place] having to ...

  Name :  Halloween 3: Season of the Witch Directed   By : Tommy Lee Wallace   Subgenre : Supernatural Thriller Series :  Spooktober 2021 entry #20; review #113 Review : Halloween is right around the corner, so what better way to celebrate the spookiest of holidays than by revisiting its eponymous horror franchise. The Halloween franchise began when John Carpenter, fresh from his relative success with the action-thriller Assault on Precinct 13 , was approached by an independent film producer and financier for a simple task: write and direct a film about a psychotic serial killer out to murder babysitters. Naturally, Carpenter (and fellow producer and screenwriter, Deborah Hill) mocked up a screenplay titled The Babysitter Murders , but apparently that was too on-the-nose, and so they opted to lean into the spookiness of the Halloween holiday instead. Bing bang boom, Halloween was born, and Michael Myers began terrorizing neighborhoods during the titular...

  Name :  The Wind Directed   By : Emma Tammi   Subgenre : Western Supernatural/Psychological Series :  Spooktober 2021 entry #19; review #112 Review : Netflix has quite a few decent-looking horror entries this year, but The Wind caught my eye for a number of reasons. First and foremost, the name: wind is my favorite of the four classical elements (despite being sorted into House Hufflepuff); while fishy monsters frequent the abyssal depths, demons and devils and other burning things muck about in fire and brimstone, and terrifying creatures burrow beneath the earth, horror films celebrating things that might lurk in the clouds above or in the invisible winds are comparatively few and far between. Secondly, I like the poster: a plains-woman stands alone against a ghastly, ethereal figure--it's super evocative! Not surprisingly, this gun-toting lass is the film's main character, Lizzy. The film opens cold with Lizzy standing in the threshold to her cabin...