Since I seem to be in a vampire mood today, this only seems appropriate!
Category Archives: Horrorthon
Horror Scenes That I Love: The Danse Macabre in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu
Since today’s horror on the lens was the original Nosferatu, it feels appropriate that today’s scene of the day should come from Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake. In this scene, Lucy (Isabella Adjani) observes firsthand the madness that has come to the town of Wismar, along with the vampire and ship full of plague-carrying rats. While the people of the town have a last supper and celebrate their impending doom, Lucy tries to figure out a way to save them from Klaus Kinski’s Dracula.
This scene is a perfect example of how the director of a remake can both pay respectful homage to his source material while also bringing his own concerns to the story.
Horror Film Review: Handling the Undead (dir by Thea Hvistendahl)
Handling The Undead opens, as many Norwegian films tend to do, with a shot of an overcast sky, an ugly apartment complex, and a forest that appears to be submerged in shadows. From the opening shots, it’s a depressing film. Again, that won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has ever watched a Norwegian film.
Three families are dealing with death. A woman has buried her young son and is now struggling not only with her grief but also her loving but overbearing father, whose attempts to make her feel better have the exact opposite result. An old woman’s longtime spouse lies in a coffin, having not yet been put back into the Earth. A woman is rushed to a hospital after an automobile accident and is not expected to live.
At night something happens. The lights turn off. Static is heard on every radio. When the lights come back, so do the dead. The grandfather hears his grandson wheezing and beating on his coffin and promptly digs him up. The old woman’s spouse climbs out of her coffin on her own and returns to the home where she lived for decades. The car accident victims opens her eyes and is alive, even though the doctor say that her heart is not beating rapidly enough to sustain life. While the local authorities try to figure out why the dead have come back to life and to try to keep track of where they’ve all gone, their relatives spend one more day with their loved ones.
The problem is that dead may be alive but they’ve come back as silent and unemotional empty shells. They seem to have a slight memory of their former lives but they don’t react to anything in a normal way. Instead, they stare straight ahead. The child has already started to decay and his return brings no happiness to his mother. In fact, there’s not much happiness to be found anywhere in Handling the Undead. One gets the feeling that even Ingmar Bergman would want to tell this film to lighten up.
Handling the Undead unfolds at a leisurely pace. There are a few creepy scenes but, for the most part, the horror comes from what we’re expecting the zombies to do than what we actually see them do. Everyone watching the movie knows what is eventually going to happen with the zombies. We know that eventually, the undead will attack the living. Handling the Undead, however, is more concerned with how the living would react to the dead than how the dead will eventually destroy the living. There’s very little dialogue and every scene is darkly lit and full of shadows. The majority of the characters hope that the returned dead will act like their old selves but they soon discover that they can’t go back to the way things once were. It’s an intelligent film about how we grieve and deal with loss.
That said, it’s also a rather dull film. It’s a deliberately boring film and, at times, it’s low-key approach feels almost as gimmicky as the blood and guts that can be found in more traditional zombie films. Stretched out to 90 minutes, the running time feels like an endurance test. And again, that’s probably what the filmmakers were going for but it doesn’t make the film any easier to sit through. When one reaches the end of a 90-minute film that is this purposefully slow, one has the right to expect more of an emotional or intellectual payoff than this film provides. This is a film that I can grudgingly respect but it’s not something that I’ll ever watch again.
4 Shots From 4 Films: Special Lamberto Bava Edition
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films is all about letting the visuals do the talking.
Today’s director in Lamberto Bava, one of the most underrated directors in the history of Italian horror cinema.
4 Shots From 4 Lamberto Bava Films
Macabre (1980, dir by Lamberto Bava, DP: Franco Delli Colli)
A Blade In the Dark (1983, dir by Lamberto Bava, DP: DP: Gianlorenzo Battaglia)
Demons 2 (1986, dir by Lamberto Bava, DP: Gianlorenzo Battaglia)
Delirium (1987, dir by Lamberto Bava, DP: Gianlorenzo Battaglia)
Fear No Evil (dir. by Frank LaLoggia)
In the early 1980s, my Dad owned a RCA Videodisc player. Among the assortment of films he owned, a few were listed as “Do Not Watch” for the kids. The Omen films, Cruising, The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, Raging Bull, The Life of Brian, and Fear No Evil. There may be others, but those were the ones I remember in particular growing up. Over time, I’ve been able to see almost all of them save for Raging Bull & Cruising. I was able to catch Fear No Evil via AMC+ earlier this year, and honestly, I wish my Dad were still alive. I’d ask him what prompted him to get this film, and watch it on purpose. I’ll never know, but here’s this movie that he was curious enough to buy at one point.
Directed by Frank LaLoggia, Fear No Evil is the tale of three Angels – Mikhail, Gabriel, and Rafael – who are out to bring back or smite Lucifer (Richard Jay Silverthorn, who also did the make up for the film), running around on Earth as a man. Lucifer states he’ll be reborn and then smites himself. We then celebrate the baptism of Baby Andrew Williams, which really doesn’t go as planned. His parents, Greg (Barry Cooper, Johnny Firecloud) and Marion (Alice Sachs, Seems Like Old Times) struggle with Andrew (Stefan Arngrim, The A-Team) over the years until his 18th birthday. An incident with the birthday cake leaves the mother injured, a father at a loss, and a teen with more freedom than he needs.
Fear No Evil basically takes Damien: The Omen II‘s story and drops it into a public school. As the Antichrist, Andrew is pretty aware of what he is and has no real regrets about it. Having an eye for Julie (Kathleen Rowe McAllen, TV’s All My Children), Andrew stalks the grounds of his local high school. He’s found brooding from the building’s fire escape and tries his best to dodge Tony (Daniel Eden, St. Elmos Fire) and his crew. Outside of the religious themes, there’s a sequence where the bullies corner Andrew in the High School shower (though it doesn’t quite turn out the way it did in Brian DePalma’s Carrie). I’m thinking that probably was the big thing that caused my Dad to keep this off our radar. When Julie discovers she’s the reincarnation of Gabriel (now Gabrielle), she and Mikhail (Elizabeth Hoffman, NBC’s Sisters, Dante’s Peak) join forces. Will they be able to stop Andrew before it’s too late?
When it comes to the acting, Fear No Evil has some over the top performances. With the notable exception of Hoffman and McAllen, most of the cast amped up the camp level with their characters. Arngrim and Cooper both have moments where their characters are completely losing it. Whether it’s a Dad starting a bar fight because his son’s the devil, or a dodgeball sequence that goes off the rails (and had me laughing throughout), everyone kind of hams it up. I will give Arngrim some marks for his voice. When he speaks up, he reminds me of the Sister of Mercy’s Andrew Eldritch, for some reason.
I did enjoy the effects and makeup, for what it’s worth. Some of the effects are full of glitter and lasers, feeling a bit like Flash Gordon or the climax of The Manitou. Richard Jay Silverthorn, who also plays Lucifer at the beginning of the film, handled the makeup and the effects. For a movie with a pretty low budget, it’s not bad at all. The music may be the film’s greatest strength. With tunes like “Blitzkreig Bop” and “Psycho Killer”, the movie’s high school setting is peppered mix of classic rock and orchestral work. The film’s score does work well with the notion that evil things are afoot.
Overall, Fear No Evil isn’t that great a film compared to others before or after it. It does deserve some kudos for trying to deliver a tale with a small budget, and the effects are somewhat interesting. It comes across, however, as just a bit much with the acting. It’s more an “In your face” kind of evil than anything subtle.
Horror on the Lens: Nosferatu (dir by F.W. Murnau)
Today’s Horror on the Lens is a classic film that really needs no introduction! Released in 1922, the German silent film Nosferatu remains one of the greatest vampire films ever made. It’s a film that we share every October and I’m happy to do so again this year!
Enjoy!
Horror Song of the Day: Main Theme From Zombi 2 by Fabio Frizzi
For today’s song of the day, we have Fabio Frizzi’s main theme from 1979’s Zombi 2. If you’ve ever seen the film, it’s impossible to hear this piece of music without imagining hundreds of zombies walking across the Brooklyn Bridge.
Artwork of the Day: Ghost Stories (by Doris Stanley)
by Doris Stanley
I don’t know what good the gun is going to do in this situation. This cover is from 1929.
Music Video of the Day: Evil Woman by Duran Duran (2024, animated by Juan Pinto)
More bands need to put out Halloween videos. Thank you, Duran Duran, for remembering the season!
Enjoy!
Late Night Retro Television Review: Monsters 2.18 “The Offering”
Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Wednesdays, I will be reviewing Monsters, which aired in syndication from 1988 to 1991. The entire series is streaming on YouTube.
This week features the most fearsome monster yet.
Episode 2.18 “The Offering”
(Dir by Ernest Farino, originally aired on February 18th, 1990)
After a serious auto accident, Lewis (Robert Krantz) wakes up in a hospital with a bandage wrapped around his head. Dr. Hubbard (Orson Bean) tells Lewis that he’s suffered a concussion and must rest. All Lewis wants to know is whether or not his mother’s surgery went okay. Dr. Hubbard sighs and says that they were not able to get all of the cancer.
Lewis’s comatose mother is a patient at the same hospital and, when Lewis sneaks into her room to visit with her, he’s shocked to discover that he can see a giant insect-like creature that is hovering over the bed and producing slugs that are burrowing under his mother’s skin. Lewis sees the same thing when he looks at other cancer patients but Dr. Hubbard insists that Lewis is only having hallucinations.
In order to try to help Lewis come to terms with both his accident and his mother’s cancer, Dr. Hubbard allows Lewis to watch as a patient undergoes radiation treatment. Lewis is the only one who can see that the slugs are drawn to the radiation and will leave a patient’s body to find the source of it. Still unable to convince Hubbard that what he’s seeing is real, Lewis sneaks out his room, steals a radioactive isotope, and prepares to make the ultimate sacrifice to save his mother.
The Offering is a return to form for Monsters. Full of atmosphere and featuring a genuinely disturbing set of monsters, this is an effective and well-acted episode that works because it captures the helplessness that everyone will feels when a family member or loved one is seriously ill. I lost my mother to cancer and my father to Parkinson’s, two diseases that are still not as understood as they should be. Like Lewis, I spent a lot of time wishing that I could somehow just see and understand what was causing their illnesses so that I could know how to save them. Cancer and Parkinson’s and dementia are all monsters that we wish we could just squash under our heel as easily as we could a bug.
In the end, Lewis eats a glowing radioactive isotope so that all of the cancer slugs will be drawn to his body. Couldn’t he have just used the isotope to lead the slugs out into the middle of the street or something? Lewis offers up his own life to save his mother. It reminds me of the old Norm McDonald joke, that dying of cancer is the equivalent of beating cancer because the cancer dies with you. That’s a good way to look at it. Cancer never wins.
Through the Shattered Lens 