Sober Horror Fan

Day 126 of Sobriety.   The Sacrament was directed by Ti West, who has recently been making pretty big waves with the Mia Goth-starring X and its sequels.   It’s embarrassing to admit, but this is another film that. like The Dark and The Wicked (2020), which I (re-)watched last week, I had actually seen it before, but didn’t I fully realize that until about halfway through. Well, that’s on me and my boozing. No doubt I was inebriated when I last watched it.   The plot of The Sacrament follows a small news team that is accompanying a man who travels to the commune of a religious cult in a remote (unspecified) jungle location to find his sister. When the crew arrives, they find that all is not well in the commune. It is made in a “found-footage” format, as a fake documentary program being filmed by the VICE media company. (Interesting aside: the cult in the movie is initially described as a “sobriety cult”!)   The film is heavily based on the actual ...

Day 120 of Sobriety. I happened to hear about The Blackcoat’s Daughter during a podcast about the 2019 film Saint Maud . It was cited as another horror film distributed by the A24 production company that bore the common hallmarks of that company’s horror roster: dark, depressive, uncompromising. Well, I’ve had a very good experience with (I think) all of the A24 horror films that I’ve seen so far, so I thought I'd check it out. And I’m glad I did.   Before being picked up by A24, the film was originally titled February , and I understand that, in some territories, it still is. It was directed by Osgood Perkins, the son of Anthony Perkins who played Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s Psycho (and its sequels).   I won’t say much about the plot, because this is definitely one of those films where the less you know about it beforehand, the better, but I would recommend it to anyone who likes creepy supernatural/occult-type stories. This really got under my skin and stayed there...

Day 117 of sobriety. The Dark and the Wicked was directed by Bryan Bertino, who has directed a number of well-regarded horror films, including his debut The Strangers (2008). He has also produced several, including Osgood Perkins' The Blackcoat's Daughter (2015). The Dark and the Wicked is his latest film as a director, and, at present, the only one I have seen.   The story is about an adult brother and sister who return to their familial farm due to the impending death of their comatose father, Upon arrival they begin to feel that an evil presence is encroaching on the family.   Before I sat down to watch The Dark and the Wicked , I had a suspicion that I might have already seen it. I watched the trailer and still wasn’t sure, so I decided to go ahead and watch the movie itself. I spent most of the film’s run-time still trying to figure out if I had already seen it. It was only later on in the evening, well after the end of the film, that I came to the conclusio...

Day 111 of Sobriety.  I had never heard of this movie at all until the day before I watched it, when it appeared in my Amazon Prime Video recommendations. I thought it sounded interesting, so I checked it out. It's often described as a “coming-of-age” movie, and I can see why—it’s kind of like The Wonder Years with a really scary serial killer in it. The plot is about a 16-year-old boy growing up in a very devout Christian family in a community that, about ten years prior to the beginning of the film, was traumatized by an unsolved string of murders. The story begins when Tyler, the young boy, discovers that the perpetrator of those horrible crimes could be shockingly close to home. The eponymous killer in the movie is based on real-life serial killer Dennis Rader, also known as the BTK Killer who murdered more than ten people in Kansas between the mid-seventies and early nineties. I have to say that while the movie does not feature any of the blood and gore that mig...

Day 109 of Sobriety. The Child was my last film to watch from Arrow Video's American Horror Project: Volume 2 set. I enjoyed the other two films in the set— Dream No Evil (1970) and Dark August (1976) and  so I was looking forward to another film in line with what I have come to expect from these sets: a left-field, low-key, eccentric, low-budget horror film. And that is exactly what I got. The plot is about a young woman who goes to work as a nanny in an isolated mansion in rural California. The mansion is situated in the middle of thick woodland, and is inhabited by the aging patriarch, his adult son, and young daughter. The mother of the family is dead, having been murdered in the woods by tramps several years prior—an incident which has cast a dark shadow over the house and all of its inhabitants. It is not long before the young nanny discovers that all is not well in the household, particularly with regards to the young daughter the eponymous “child” of the fil...

Day 108 of Sobriety.  Eyeball is a giallo by Umberto Lenzi, who is perhaps best known to horror fans for directing a couple of the better-known Italian cannibal films, including the notorious Cannibal Ferox (1981). His resume also includes a number of other well-regarded giallo and poliziotteschi (crime films). Not much in the way of straight-up horror, but he did direct 1988’s Ghosthouse (AKA La Casa ), which I watched recently and wrote about on this blog. The plot follows a group of American tourists who are traveling around Spain on a tour bus, and who start to get murdered one-by-one by an unknown killer whose trademark is gouging out one of the victim’s eyeballs. I don’t know why I keep watching movies like this, but I do. Objectively speaking, pretty much every aspect of Eyeball is ridiculous. The characters that comprise the small tour group are all complete oddballs: a lesbian “photographer” and her model girlfriend, a bickering couple comprising a bitchy ...

Day 102 of Sobriety. The House That Screamed (AKA La Residencia and The Finishing School ) was a bit of an oddity, and actually very good. It is a Spanish production that was made with (dubbed) English dialogue (the first ever film to do that, apparently), which stars a cast of lesser-known, but very competent British and European actors. The setting is France in the 19th century, and the plot concerns an isolated and very grand boarding school for “wayward girls,” which is governed by a strict headmistress. Shortly after the arrival of a new girl, some of the students begin being murdered by an unknown assailant. As I watched The House That Screamed , I felt that I was watching a strange combination of a lavish European gothic and a “women in prison” movie, but upon reading a little about it afterwards, I learned that it is widely regarded as an seminal "proto-slasher." That assessment is certainly a valid one. The setting and period lend the film its gothic e...

Day 101 of Sobriety.  So, this is my first post of the new year, and my first after an almost two-week hiatus due to having a ten-day holiday (unusually-long for me) over the new-year period, during which I allowed myself to fall into a blissful routine of doing almost nothing productive every day—including writing for this blog. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t watch any horror movies, though—far from it. By my reckoning, I watched over twenty horror films during that period (and quite a few non-horror movies too)—including a trip to the cinema to see Eli Roth’s rather good Thanksgiving . Part of me feels that I should backtrack and write about some of the films I watched, but due to the limited time I have, I will refrain from doing that and move ever onwards. My period of absence also included my 100th day of sobriety—something of a small milestone, I suppose. Anyway, I digress. Midnight Mass is not actually a movie, but a TV series, released by Netflix. It was direc...