Sober Horror Fan

Day 12 of Sobriety. Sleepaway Camp is one of the most well-known American “slasher” movies from the 1980s. At the time of its release, it was originally widely criticized for borrowing too much from Friday the 13th (1980) and similar films. In retrospect, considering the glut of such movies that followed throughout the 80s and beyond, and the fact that, to a certain extent at least, fans of these movies don’t particularly seem to mind the heavy-handed use of formula and tropes, such criticism seems largely irrelevant. I enjoyed Sleepaway Camp a lot. I thought it was a good example of a formulaic slasher done right. It is lean (less than 90 minutes), funny, shocking, and very entertaining. I also thought that, while sticking to the formula, it had plenty of originality—and strangeness. The film is notorious for its shocking denouement, and even though I pretty much knew what was coming, yeah, it was pretty intense. But, the less you know about this film going in the bet...

Day 9 of Sobriety This could be described as the entry in Roger Corman’s Edgar Allen Poe cycle of films that wasn’t actually directed by Roger Corman. Perhaps that is why I found a little lackluster compared to the other films that I have seen in the cycle (so far House of Usher , The Pit and the Pendulum , The Haunted Palace , and The Masque of the Red Death —and most of the other titles are waiting on my shelf). But having said that, the actual director, Gordon Hessler, has made a fair number of good films, including The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974), and (ahem) Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park (1978). He also directed another Vincent Price film, Cry of the Banshee (1970), which I haven’t seen yet, but am looking forward to.   Apparently Hessler stepped in to replace Michael Reeves (of Witchfinder General fame) when Reeves became unavailable due to illness. I wonder what The Oblong Box would have been like if it had been directed by Reeves? We’ll never know. ...

Day 8 of Sobriety. I had never heard of Frailty until fairly recently when I was reading an interview with horror podcaster and author Scott A. Bradley on the Adventures Underground website. Scott was raised in a fundamentalist Christian doomsday cult (i.e., they believed that the world was going to end imminently), and the interviewer asked him his opinion on which movies about cults were the most authentic. Two that he singled out were Frailty and Martha Marcy May Marlene from 2011. As he is obviously someone who knows what he is talking about, I sought out cheap ex-rental copies of both movies. I have something of an interest in cults, largely stemming from an interest in cults as depicted in films like Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy , but also real cults, like the Process Church and the Manson Family. Now, I realize that I need to be careful here, because, unlike horror movies, such cults were real, and people were harmed by them, so I am careful to temper my interest and curiosi...

 Day 7 of Sobriety. Smile is about a psychotherapist who encounters a malevolent supernatural entity in the course of her work. I enjoyed Smile . I had reservations about it going in, because of some things I had read about it—in particular that it was rife with jump-scares, of which I am not a fan. I does have quite a few jump-scares, but I thought it was nowhere near as bad as some of the worst offenders—for example, in recent memory, The Nun (2018) and the excruciating, ear-drum-destroying “quiet—BOO! quiet—BOO!” of The Possession of Michael King (2014). Also (and this is very unusual for me), I thought that most of the jump-scares were actually skillfully done and congruent with the development of the story as a whole. The performance of the lead actress (Sosie Bacon) playing the psychotherapist was very good. For a large part of its running time, I felt that the film played more like a psychological horror film than a supernatural one, but by the end it’s horror...

Day 6 of Sobriety. Enys Men depicts the experiences of a woman who has volunteered to conduct an observational study of rare flora on an isolated and seemingly completely uninhabited island off the coast of Cornwall. While doing this, she begins to have strange experiences, including what could be hallucinations or visions (or perhaps just memories?). The film is frequently described as "folk horror"—a sub-genre of which I consider myself to be quite a fan. The more I read about the film (and heard about it on a BBC radio special on folk horror that focused heavily on it), the more my interest was piqued—not least by the polarized viewer reviews and opinions that I read. It seemed to always get either one star or ten. The fact that its critics almost unanimously derided it because "absolutely nothing happens!" only served to stimulate my interest further, as I often tend to like what can be termed "trance movies"—films that require us to adju...

Day 2 of Sobriety. I recently revisited John Landis’ American Werewolf in London for the first time in decades. I watched it with my wife, who didn’t seem especially taken by it, despite my enthusings. While watching it, though, I was struck by how good Jenny Agutter was in her role, which lead me to think about how I have always liked her as an actress, even though I couldn’t really think of that much I had seen her in. Logan’s Run was perhaps the other real standout, and, of course, she was very good as a child actor in The Railway Children (1970) and I start Counting (1969). It dawned on me though, that I haven’t actually seen many of her films. Looking at her filmography, a horror movie that I hadn’t seen stood out: 1987’s Dark Tower . Released six years after American Werewolf , but for some reason she only made one other film in that period. Looking further into Dark Tower , I found that it is generally quite derided as a turkey, but I also found out that it had been...

 Day 1 of Sobriety. This TV movie had been on my radar for a long time. Largely because I am a bit of a fan of Nigel Kneale, who wrote the screenplay (adapted from a novel by Susan Hill).  Kneale is probably best know to horror fans as the man who created Prof. Bernard Quatermass, for writing the screenplays for several excellent Hammer films, and also for writing the screenplay for Halloween III . Those who have taken a deeper dive may also be familiar with his very strange short-lived "animal-horror"-themed TV series Beasts and his witchy folk horror TV Play for Today Murrain . I was prompted to shell out for the blu-ray of The Woman in Black after hearing it discussed on the excellent Discover the Horror podcast. The film was originally broadcast on British TV on Christmas Eve 1989, and, as one of the Discover the Horror presenters rightly pointed out, it can, to a large extent, be positioned as part of a UK tradition of showing ghost stories on TV around Christ...