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The veils between the worlds may be at their thinnest on Samhain, but the darkest night of the year is now upon us. Walpurgis Night. The Eve of Beltane. The Night of the Witches, when those dark beings meet on the Brocken mountain and hold revels with their gods.  Bar the door and shutter your windows upon this May Eve.  For tonight, the darkness takes shape.

Each night, the people of Arkham cowered behind their flimsy wooden doors, terrified of what lurked beyond. But it was the the Beltane Eve, the night of Walpurgis, that the old men of Arkham still speak of in whispered words and phrases. They say that the hills burned with an unnatural glow that night, that satanic psalms floated down to the town below, as creatures of darkness danced and gibbered in the moonlight.

Read more in my book, That Which Should Not Be.

After the explosion of popularity in found-footage style horror following the release of The Blair Witch Project, the genre became oversaturated to the point that new releases elicited little more than an eye-roll. I know cameramen are dedicated to their craft, but would they really keep filming when the witches or the zombies or the werewolves were tearing their faces off? Probably not. And yet, there’s something about found footage that is different. It grabs the viewer and pulls them in in a way that can’t be replicated in traditional films.

Butterfly Kisses is a found-footage film within a documentary within a documentary. It tells the story of a filmmaker, Gavin, who discovers a box of old films in the basement of his in-law’s home. No one really knows where the films came from, but when Gavin begins to watch them, he realizes they are the rough footage of a documentary some students shot about a local urban legend. The story goes that if you stare down a train tunnel for a full hour without blinking, a demon named Peeping Tom will appear in your distant vision. Why would that be the case? Who knows. Don’t think about it too much. But every time you blink, he gets closer…and closer…and closer. Until he’s right up on you and then…he gives you butterfly kisses.

OK, so that’s probably the dumbest, least frightening twist possible. But hear me out. This is a good movie. It’s not Lake Mungo good, which may be my favorite of this type of found-footage film. But it is consistently engaging, with a plot that sucks you in. The acting is great, the movie in a movie in a movie setup works. Does it sorta sputter to an end? Do people do really dumb things? Does the central conceit violate the rules set up in the beginning? Yeah, and that’s why it’s not a perfect movie. But it’s one you’ll enjoy and one you’ll think about well after the final credits roll.

3.75 stars

When Jordan Peele’s Get Out hit theaters, it was a revelation. A film that was equal parts horrifying and hilarious, Get Out was also the latest in a long line of horror movies that addressed the shortcomings of our society. It’s hard to think of a movie that more trenchantly tackled the racism that still exists today, particularly prejudices that aren’t as pronounced or overt as in decades past. I loved Get Out unreservedly, and I could not wait to see Us. Although not as impactful as Get Out, Us confirms Peele’s place as the most exciting director in the genre today.

            Get Out was a pretty strange movie at times; Us is insane. It’s difficult to describe the storyline without giving too much away, so I’ll keep it simple. A family goes on vacation to a seaside town where the main character had a disturbing encounter when she was a very young girl. Then another family shows up in their driveway, and everything goes to hell.

            Us is one of those movies where you shouldn’t necessarily turn off your brain, but you also shouldn’t think too deeply about what is going on. This is fairytale level crazy, and when you’re reading a fairytale, you don’t ask too many questions about why the animals can talk or where the fairy godmother gets her powers. Same here. The movie is at its weakest when it tells too much, and I would have been happier with less exposition. But that’s a minor gripe, and it’s one that is overcome by the shear freakiness of the movie.

            Us is deeply unsettling. It hits at something fundamental, something at the core of your being. It plays in places that most horror movies do not go, and it does it while maintaining a sinister tone of dread, lightened in all the right places with Peele’s trademark humor.

I’m sure Us has deeper meaning, but I’ll let other people worry about that. I enjoyed Us for what it was. You will too.

4.25 out of 5 stars

Sometimes you just want a movie that does what it does and does it well. Overlord is one of those movies.

Overlord begins the day before the invasion of Nazi Germany by the Allied Expeditionary Forces. Our heroes are members of the 101^st Airborne, and they’re on a plane ready to jump behind enemy territory to prepare the ground for invasion. They must destroy a radio tower, and if they don’t, the allied air force will be unable to take control of the skies. But when the team reach their target, they find a Nazi lab bent on building super soldiers who will win the war for Germany—whatever the cost.

Overlord is tense from the word go, setting the stage for what is to come by a thrilling segment where allied planes are maneuvering through enemy flack so thick you can’t believe any of them can make it. When the team reaches the ground, the tension doesn’t let up. The SS soldiers who are running the research station—and providing unwilling test subjects from the local populace—make delightfully unambiguously evil villains. Being unambiguously evil is the only thing Nazis are good for, and the filmmakers use them to full effect.

Overlord is far from a perfect movie. If you let yourself think about it for too long—more than a couple minutes, actually—you’ll note some glaring anachronisms and some plot threads that are never tied together. Still, this is a solid horror flick, good for more than a few scares. Well worth the viewing.

4 Stars

We’re in the midst of a horror renaissance, and in the last several years, dozens of new classics of the genre have hit theaters. With so many to pick from, I recently decided to choose…The Meg.

People love a good shark movie. Jaws is a classic. Deep Blue Sea isn’t perfect, but it has some incredible moments. And there’s always Sharknado. I-V. Meg won’t be joining that list.

Jonas (I wish they’d just gone full own and called him Jonah) is a rescue diver who experienced something he couldn’t explain in a deep-sea dive to save the crew of a submarine. He lost two members of his team, and for the last five years, he’s lived in self-imposed exile in Thailand, drinking Chang beer and pretty much having a good time wallowing in his own misery. He’s supposed to be washed up and tortured, but Jason Statham plays the character like he plays all his roles—tough guy with the heart of gold, quick with a one-liner and always willing to save the day. When a deep sea research team, led by his ex-wife, experiences trouble exploring a heretofore unknown part of the ocean, he rides in to save the day. This is much to the chagrin of the doctor on the research station, the same doctor who declared him unfit to dive after the last tragedy. Oh, and the doctor also happened to be on the submarine Jonas saved five years before. The coincidences are just amazing. Anyway, the research group is led by a father and daughter team, and the billionaire who finances their research. When it becomes clear that a megalodon is on the loose, they must figure out a way to stop it.

There’s a lot going on in Meg, too much. The doctor storyline plays out pretty quickly and seems unnecessary. As does the ex-wife storyline. You might expect them to get back together, but the whole notion of these two ever having been a couple in the first place is utterly implausible. Instead, Jonas is interested in the daughter of the father-daughter team. They have no chemistry, whatsoever. Meanwhile, most of the tension is generated by people doing really, really dumb things. How many times do people have to fall off the back of a boat before they stop standing on the edge of it, or, I don’t know, holding on? And man, does this movie drag on. It’s at least twenty minutes longer than it should be. At least.

Meg works best, when it works at all, as a comedy. If it embraced it fully, it would probably be at least arguably worth your time. But it doesn’t, and it’s clear the actors don’t take it all that seriously. Or at least, I hope they don’t take it seriously. Otherwise, I fear for their careers.

Here’s the thing—if you love shark movies, need to see them all, and you have absolutely nothing else to do with your time, Meg is moderately entertaining. Moderately.

2 Stars

Go watch it on Netflix. Go watch it now.

A reader named Stephanie sent me an email about my earlier post on A Head Full of Ghosts, and I found it so interesting I thought I’d post it and my answer here. Warning: Major Spoilers ahead. If you haven’t read the book, don’t read the question. Once you do, leave me a comment and let me know what you think.

Here’s the question.

If Marjorie has access to the poison, why didn’t she just poison the family herself? She knew Merry wouldn’t eat the tomato sauce, so she could have quietly added the poison to the sauce without involving Merry at all. Especially since one theory is Marjorie truly cared for Merry and was attempting to spare her life. I do not see much kindness in tricking Merry and thus having her live with the potential guilt and trauma. What are your thoughts?

This is an excellent question that I never really considered. It’s possible that I enjoyed the ending so much that I never thought about it. But looking back, why did Marjorie do that? There’s a couple possible answers I can think of. One is superficial, while the other fits more squarely in the narrative.

1. It’s just an homage to We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

Ghosts is full of homages to other horror novels, none more obvious than Merry being named after Mary Katherine “Merricat” Blackwood from We Have Always Lived in the Castle. And if it wasn’t obvious, it becomes so when Merry poisons her family, just as Merricat did in Castle. Under this theory, she doesn’t do it for any particular reason; it just made for a handy homage and shocking ending. Like I said, superficial, but certainly possible. Theory 2 is more satisfying, albeit much darker.

2. Because Marjorie is filled with hate for everyone, including Merry.

Whether Marjorie is possessed by a demon or a paranoid schizophrenic, she’s been through hell and is filled with anger and hate. Her father allowed the most traumatic time of her life to be televised for the world to see. Her mother abandoned her and let it happen. That explains why she kills them, but why put Merry in the middle of it?

Because, deep down, Merry was the person she despised the most.

Oh there was some conflict, and we see that in the confused and inconsistent way that Marjorie treats Merry. But at the end of the day, Marjorie subjected Merry to some of the worst of her psychotic episodes. And why not? Merry was normal. She wasn’t troubled. She was fine. Is it any surprise that Marjorie’s envy would get the best of her? And that it would drive her to the ultimate act of revenge? If Marjorie could never be normal and well-adjusted, if she could never be happy and untroubled, then she was going to make damn sure that neither could Merry.

And I would say she succeeded.

When Veronica hit Netflix, it did so with quite the buzz, with some people asking if it was the scariest movie of all time. FoxNews reported that it was so scary, people were turning it off half-way through. So of course, I had to see it.

I finally got around to watching it, and you’ll be shocked to learn that it doesn’t quite live up to expectations.

Veronica begins with the police responding to a 911 call. We hear the call (or should I say we read it as the whole movie is in Spanish). Whatever the police find is horrifying, but we don’t find out immediately what that is. Instead, we are taken back in time three days. It seems our eponymous lead character has decided to hold a séance–on the day of an eclipse, no less. We learn later that she is something of an expert on the occult, although, spoiler alert!, she doesn’t actually read the instructions on how to conduct a séance, leading to a few problems down the road. Now something is hunting her, and her family.

Veronica does many things well. It’s beautifully shot—check out the scene where everyone is moving backward—and well-acted, even by the children. The practical effects are well done, and the suspense is built nicely over the course of the movie. It drags a bit in the beginning, but as the movie goes along, it gets better and better. And to top it off, it’s based on a true story.

Is Veronica the scariest movie ever? That would be a big fat no, and I can offer you some proof. The movie’s director, Paco Plaza, also directed the terrifying REC. Not only is Veronica not the scariest movie ever, it’s not even Plaza’s scariest.

But that’s no reason not to watch it. Please do, but do so with your expectations properly calibrated. And if you are going to use a Ouija board, read the instructions first, OK?

Hello all. Apologies for the delay between posts. I’ve had a busy couple months. First the holidays and then a trip to central and eastern Europe–lots of potential stories there–along with a move can take up most of your time. I’ve also been working on the sequel to That Which Should Not Be and He Who Walks in Shadow. By all rights, that book should have been done a year ago, but I ran into a bit of a wall that I only really broke through in Bratislava. So yay to Slovakia, right?

Anyway, if you know me at all you know that I’m a sucker for documentaries. Good thing we are in a bit of a documentary golden age, with Netflix leading the way. Out now are three documentaries, all horrific in their own way, that I want you to go check out. The first is

Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes

Ted Bundy is the all-American psychopath. Suave, intelligent, and yes, some would say attractive, Bundy set the stereotype for the murdering psychotic who feels no remorse and no emotion. Just as disturbed as Dahmer or Gacy, Bundy hid that madness behind a telegenic, engaging personality that made him all the more dangerous. In this documentary, Netflix tells the story of Bundy’s multi-state murder spree with an assist from Bundy himself. Historic footage is overlaid with Bundy’s voice, narrating the story as it goes along. There may be times you even start to buy some of Bundy’s BS. But then you see his eyes, those awful, soulless eyes. The documentary also serves as a strong argument for the death penalty, at least in extreme circumstances like these, and demonstrates that defense attorneys truly believe that no one should be found guilty of anything.

Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened

Now for something completely different though perhaps equally insane, albeit with no body count (by the grace of God). Fyre tells the story of the infamous Fyre Festival, that absolute disaster of a music festival that unfolded in the Bahamas in the spring of 2017. More than anything, the Fyre documentary encompasses the notion of magical thinking, the idea that things will just work out, somehow, and everything will be fine, even without a plan or any conceivable path to success. The film interviews many of the people involved behind the scenes of the disaster, and everyone of them says, at least once, that they just kept doing what they were doing and hoped it would be OK. Why would it work out? Well it’s a mystery. The only guy who seemed interested in solving problems was the random pilot who got fired for suggesting they would need a lot of toilets. Another thing that struck me is how everyone in film kept referring to a mysterious “they” or “them” that were responsible for everything going wrong at the festival. Obviously Billy McFarland deserves much of the blame, but so do the people on our screens, people who consistently enabled him for the same reason he kept the fraud going–money.

Murder Mountain

Murder Mountain is a documentary that enlightened me to something I had no idea existed–Humboldt County, California, a county in rebellion against all forms of government where apparently a large portion of the nation’s marijuana is grown. Alongside do-gooder hippies are the more ruthless and cutthroat growers, those who stay on the black market even as legalization spreads. These hard core drug traffickers act like it, and because of their actions, the number of people missing in Humboldt County is far higher than the norm. The documentary focuses on one missing person in particular, and how the locals handled the situation when the sheriff’s office seemed uninterested. And by the way, if there’s one group of people who stumbled into the viral villain of the month category, it’s the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office. I assume that as more people see Murder Mountain, you’ll be hearing a lot more about them as well.

I bought this book because of the title. Period. Covers are great, and I’ve made more than one purchase based on them, but what I really love is a good title. True, it’s not the most scientific way to choose what you are going to read, but I find it about as effective as reading reviews. And usually it works out. But sadly, this time I was disappointed. 

The Rib From Which I Remake the World has an interesting premise competently executed. First, the synopsis. 

In a small, rural Arkansas town in the midst of World War II, hotel house detective George “Jojo” Walker wearily maintains the status quo in the wake of personal devastation. That status quo is disrupted when a hygiene picture roadshow rolls into town with a controversial program on display and curious motives in mind. What begins with a gruesome and impossible murder soon spirals into hallucinatory waking nightmares for Jojo—nightmares that converge with his reality and dredge up his painful, secret past. Black magic and a terrifying Luciferian carnival boil up to a surreal finale for the town of Litchfield, when truth itself unfurls and Jojo Walker is forced to face his own identity in ways he could never have expected.

Sound interesting, right? And it is. The small town has everything one would expect a small town to have in the 40s. A soda shop, a movie palace, an over-zealous church body. It’s sufficiently Arkansas, with the latent racism and the overwhelming heat. The heat is particularly well done. You can feel it as if you were there. 

And those are all good things. But something’s missing, and I can’t quite put my finger on what it is. I didn’t really enjoy this book. Oh, I finished it, without trouble or complaint. I was moderately interested to find out what was going to happen. So why didn’t it come together? I don’t know. I can’t really say. 

It’s as if the book just never got its feet underneath it. Some of that was poor editing. I’m not talking typos; I don’t care about those. But there’s a strange part in the middle of the book where the two main characters have the same plot developing conversations–complete with repeated surprise at certain revelations–in two successive sections. It’s so bizarre and off-putting that I considered it possible that it was just part of the book, another symptom of the weirdness of the situation. But I don’t think so. It’s also strange that a major plot point–one of the characters breaking her ankle–is essentially forgotten as soon as it become convenient to do so. At one point, she is laying in a ditch unable to move. At another, she is running down the street. 

I really don’t know what to say about Rib. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it either. At the end of the day, I can’t recommend it, but I won’t tell you to steer clear.

I know–this review is pretty much worthless. At the end of the day, you’ll just have to decide whether the title is worth giving it a shot. 

3 Stars

Bringing back one of my favorite things about the site–Free Music Friday. For this week,  enjoy “Right Now” by HAIM. I love in-studio videos, and this is one of the best. Wait for the drums at the end. Fantastic.

I had the opportunity to catch the latest Halloween movie and I have to say it lived up to the hype. The decision to set the film immediately after the first was, in my estimation, a brilliant one.

It’s interesting to think about that decision and what it means for fans of the series. It’s as if Halloween occupies multiple worlds in some multiverse. In one, the series essentially ended with Halloween H20 when Laurie Strode chopped off Michael’s head. (I choose to believe that Halloween: Resurrection exists in no universe). The other drops all the baggage altogether and supposes that Michael was taken into custody at the end of the original movie and has been in an insane asylum ever since. Laurie went on with her life, of course, but was forever scared. And she has been waiting and preparing for the day that Michael comes home.

Halloween (2018), of course, isn’t Halloween. Nothing could be. Halloween broke barriers and broke the mold. I can only imagine what seeing it in theaters must have been like, just as I can only imagine what it must have been like to see Star Wars for the first time. But this is a triumph. Watch it, and watch for all the call backs and hat tips spread throughout. It’s a joy.

 ***

I finally got around to watching the third episode of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. It was better, but still below the potential of the show. The show is just so trite, so contrived. For a show where the hero is a member of the devil’s own personal coven, you’d think things would be less black and white. And yet, ever character is a caricature, every plot outside of the main one utterly conventional.

For example, Harvey, Sabrina’s boyfriend, has a father who wants him to follow him into the mines and give up his silly dream of being an artist, and of course he expresses this view in the harshest way possible. He’s presented as a tyrant, true to stereotype. Then there’s the c-plot involving the close-minded, ultra-conservative, anti-woman principal’s decision to ban certain books from the library. Our heroes manage to get the school board to reconsider this decision, but it will take three months. Then we find out one of the characters, the one that most wants to read the books, has ocular degeneration and will be rendered blind…in three months.

Of course.

Episode Three was good enough for me to continue on into the show, but I’m concerned that the fundamental laziness at the heart of the series won’t go away anytime soon. And that’s a shame and an opportunity wasted. It could have been so much better.

October is over. The long, cold winter has begun. It’s always a sad time for me, leaving the Halloween season behind. And lately that has essentially meant the shuttering of this website. I enjoy 31 Days of Halloween quite a bit, but doing 31 blog posts in 31 days is no easy feat. For a lot of blogs, that approaches a year’s production all by itself. This year, I’m going to try to be better. We’ll see. For now, some short thoughts.

I started watching the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina on Netflix recently. I’m only a couple episodes in but I gotta say, so far I’m disappointed. The characters are either unlikable or so poorly developed that they are little more than cardboard cutouts. There’s no real narrative flow at all, and the division between the mortal world and the witching world is jarring. Harvey is awful, just awful, as are the rest of Sabrina’s mortal friends. The main story line in the mortal world to this point is so trite, so cliche as to be eye-rollingly bad. Far more compelling is what’s going on in the witching world, but we keep getting yanked out of that in favor of whatever is going on at the local high school.

Fortunately, there is hope things will get better. The show is from the creators of the CW’s Riverdale, a shockingly good teenage drama with more than a little bit of a horrific undercurrent. Seriously, Riverdale must be the foggiest city in America. And there is a rich vein of horror to mine in Sabrina. That’s part of the problem, as the creators have attempted to ram too much information and plot into the first few episodes.

It’s probably a little unfair of me to criticize the show so early on, and I am reserving judgment. But things need to improve, and fast, or Sabrina will be a massive disappointment.

The day is here, the day we’ve all been waiting for. I wish you and the ones you love a Happy Halloween. Have fun, but beware the shadows!