Let's Scare Chad

  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...

  Name :  Absentia Directed   By : Mike Flanagan   Subgenre : Creature Feature Thriller Series :  Spooktober 2021 entry #18; review #111 Review : Mike Flanagan is so hot right now. You may already know this from my review (or literally anyone else's, as there's no dearth of opinions floating around the internet) of Midnight Mass , or you may know Flanagan from his work on Doctor Sleep, Oculus, The Haunting of Hill House and/or Bly Manor ; either way, putting his name on a horror project is like printing money. And that's largely due to him proving how original and creative his visions are, so I wanted to go back and check on his first foray into the realm of horror: 2011's Absentia . Absentia is a good film, but it's not without it's flaws. After binging Midnight Mass before checking this one out, it's fun to see just how much Flanagan has grown as a writer and director. Originally funded via a Kickstarter campaign, Absentia follows Tricia as she tak...

  Name :  The House That Jack Built Directed   By : Lars von Trier   Subgenre : Psychological Slasher (with some supernatural elements toward the end) Series :  Spooktober 2021 entry #17; review #110 Review : This will come as a shock to no one, but I'm on Reddit. I frequent the horror subreddit--along with other horror subs, blogs, and pages--quite a bit to keep my finger on the spooky community's pulse. Time and time again, The House That Jack Built gets brought up as one of the most disturbing modern films around, which isn't all that surprising given that it's written and directed by Lars von Trier, who's known for having some downright upsetting scenes in his films to say the least (specifically, everything about Antichrist ). In fact, the cinephile community at large developed a bit of a buzz for The House after initial screenings of the film's unrated version caused over a hundred people to walk out--though those remaining reportedly gave the film...

  Name :  Super Hot Directed   By : Taylor King   Subgenre : Comedy, Creature Feature Series :  Spooktober 2021 entry #16; review #109 Review : Quick review; buckle up! Super Hot isn't a horror movie. I accidentally thought it was, but we're reviewing it anyway! Super Hot is a comedy film first and foremost, and it has very little, if any, horror elements beyond a singular scene of halfway decent gore. Let's rewind a bit, though. Super Hot is about Jackie, our main dame, as she mourns the brutal friend-zoning she received from her crush, Carmen. Encouraged to try and wriggle her way out of that circle of angsty Hell, Jackie goes to visit Carmen at her new sorority house only to discover that things aren't quite as cucumber-cool there as she had assumed. It's up to Jackie and her gang of misfit nerds to rescue Carmen before it's too late! There are a few twists and turns, but Super Hot primarily positions itself as an extremely low-budget Slackers ...

  Name :  Slaxx Directed   By : Elza Kephart   Subgenre : Comedy Series :  Spooktober 2021 entry #15; review #108 Review : It is that time of the season where the Council of Chads decides on which possessed, killer item to induct into our collection. See, we have a bit of a problem: we love stupid horror movies about items that normally shouldn't be alive coming to live and wreaking all sorts of havoc. In 2018, we started our collection with the famously lampooned Death Bed: The Bed That Eats ; in 2019, we added the Killer Sofa ; in 2020, we collected the killer Nazi carousel unicorn from CarousHELL ; and in 2021, we're putting on a pair of evil pants. That's right, we're watching the Shudder original: Slaxx . The film follows Libby, the plucky new salesclerk at a trendy clothing store, as she tries to stop a pair of possessed jeans from murdering everyone it comes across. And with a premise like that, you might expect a comedic tone more in line with the...

  Name :  Candyman (1992) and Candyman  (2021) Directed   By : Bernard Rose (1992) and Nia DaCosta (2021)  Subgenre : Supernatural Slasher Series :  Spooktober 2021 entry #14; Remake Rampage #3; review #107 Review : "I am the writing on the wall, the whisper in the classroom. Without these things, I am nothing." A bit late to the game with this review, given that the hype surrounding the newest iteration of the Candyman franchise has mostly died off already, but I wanted to wait to the spookiest month of the year to see whether DaCosta's vision of the honeyed killer stacks up against Rose's version from 1992--and whether that original film still holds up today. It's going to be a bit of a long one (as these Remake Rampage entries tend to be), so get comfy--and thanks for sticking around. To fully appreciate Nia DaCosta's Candyman , it's imperative to have Rose's Candyman fresh on the mind; Candyman (2021) is a spiritual successor to the origina...

  Name :  Midnight Mass Directed   By : Mike Flanagan   Subgenre : Creature Feature meets Religiously-Themed Drama Series :  Spooktober 2021 entry #13; review #106 Review : I don't do a lot of series reviews. As binge-worthy as they may be, they take up a considerable amount of time compared to individual films and that's kind of exhausting when you're trying to do a review every day throughout the month. However, Mike Flanagan is horror's new hotness (like Ari Aster, James Wan, Jordan Peele, along with several other modern directors); everyone's been talking about the series, and so I knew I needed to binge it. Special thanks to my good buddy, Katie, for carving out some time to help out in that endeavor! Love ya! So, Midnight Mass is a seven-episode limited series on Netflix, with each episode averaging at about an hour. We follow our main sir, Riley Flynn, as he returns home to his family in their struggling island town. Riley isn't the only new bl...

Name :  The Deep Ones Directed   By : Chad Ferrin  Subgenre : Lovecraftian Thriller Series :  Spooktober 2021 entry #12; Trash Panda Files #6 review #105 Review : I've got a thing for H.P. Lovecraft. Well, not the man himself, given the racism and all that, but his ideas. I could speak at length about Lovecraft's piecemeal mythos--on how the mythopoeic pantheon is fundamentally atheistic and the existentially dreadful nihilism that follows from that gnosis--but no one really wants to hear all that pretentious crap, at least not on my blog. Lovecraft's ideas, specifically on entities that are so cosmically advanced that their mere existence in our 3D space has a habit of breaking our feeble minds, are so fundamentally different than the moral fears of demons and devils, the terror of mundane slashers and stalkers, and the gothic horror of ghosts, ghouls, and other things that go bump in the night; the horror that Lovecraft so masterfully captured stems from the fea...