Thanks to the one and only John Carpenter, the version of this sweet little song that The Chordettes recorded in the 1950s will be forever associated with the Night He Came Home. Sadly, none of the Chordettes are with us anymore and I haven’t been able to find any interviews about how they felt about their song of teenage love being used in Halloween.
I’d like to think they would have appreciated it. Michael Myers may not have had hair like Liberace but he did have a mask that looked a lot like William Shatner.
Tonight’s horror scene that I love is from the 1982 film, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, a film that has finally started to be recognized for being the horror classic that it is.
In this scene, Conal Cochran (Dan O’Herlihy) explains not only the origins of Halloween but he also discusses how he’s going to make Halloween great again. This scene is probably the best in the film and it’s almost entirely due to O’Herlihy’s wonderfully menacing performance as Conal Cochran.
Vincent Price was born, at the start of the 20th Century, in St. Louis, Missouri. When he first began his film career in the 1930s, he was promoted as a leading man and he was even tested for the role of Ashley Wilkes in Gone With TheWind. (Imagine that!) However, Price would find his greatest fame as a horror icon.
Among the fans of Price’s horror films was a young animator named Tim Burton. In 1982, Price and Burton would work together for the first time, with Price providing the narration for a short, stop motion film that Burton had written and directed. Called Vincent, the film was about a seven year-old boy named Vincent who wanted to be — can you guess? — Vincent Price! The six-minute film follows Vincent as he gets involved in all sorts of macabre activities. Of course, as Vincent’s mom points out, Vincent isn’t actually a monster or mad scientist. He’s just a creative child with an overactive imagination. (To say the short feels autobiographical on Burton’s part would be an understatement.) The animation is outstanding and full of wit but it really is Vincent Price’s wonderful narration that makes this short film a classic.
Both Price and Burton would later call making this film one of the most creatively rewarding collaborations of their respective careers.
When I first saw that this trailer was for a film called Lake George, I automatically thought of Lake Placid and assumed that this was another film about a giant crocodile.
Well, it’s not. Apparently, it’s a film in which Jeremy Renner Shea Whigham plays a criminal who is forced to do one last job. However, when he falls in love with the woman he was supposed to kill, they go on a road trip instead.
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 is one of the most important names in the history of American horror cinema, George Romero!
4 Shots From 4 George Romero Films
Night of the Living Dead (1968, dir by George Romero, DP: George Romero)
Season of the Witch (1973, dir by George Romero, DP: George Romero)
Dawn of the Dead (1978, dir by George Romero, DP: Michael Gornick)
Creepshow (1982, dir by George Romero, written by Stephen King, DP: Michael Gornick)
Yesterday, Disney+ released a trailer for all of the new Marvel shows that will be coming out later this year and in 2025. The majority of the trailer highlight Daredevil: Born Again.
Admittedly, we’ve gotten used to Marvel and its movies and its show and, as such, a new Marvel trailer is no longer the big event that it used to be. (The Marvel trailers that excite us usually involve characters like Deadpool, who comment on and satirize the conventions of the comic book movie. We love Deadpool’s jaded perspective because we’ve all gotten jaded ourselves.)
That said, the Daredevil: Born Again footage looked cool. The animated stuff was a bit of a mixed bag. (Jeff tells me that Marvel Zombies have been around for a while but I still laughed when they showed up in the trailer.) Ironheart looks insanely boring. But Daredevil, I’m cautiously optimistic about.
On October 30th, 1938, Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater On The Air broadcast an adaptation of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds and, legend has it, they scared the ever-loving heck out of America.
Actually, there’s some debate as to just how panicked America got when they heard the Mercury Theater On The Air’s adaptation of War of the Worlds. There was definitely some panic but there are differing reports on just how wide spread it was. For our purposes, let’s assume that the entire country was terrified at the same time and that everyone was loading up a shotgun and planning to go out and look for aliens. One thing is for sure. With his adaptation of War of the Worlds, Orson Welles managed to invent the whole found footage genre that would later come to dominate horror cinema in the late 90s and the aughts. Every found footage horror film owes a debt to what Orson Welles accomplished with War of the Worlds. We won’t hold that against Orson. Instead, it’s just another example of how far ahead of his time Orson Welles was.
H.G. Wells, the original author of War of the Worlds, and Orson Welles only met once, while they were both in San Antonio, Texas in 1940. (Orson Welles and H.G. Wells hanging out in San Antonio? To be honest, that sounds like it would make a good movie.) They were interviewed for a local radio station. H.G. Wells expressed some skepticism about the reports of Americans panicking while Welles compared the radio broadcast to someone dressing up like a ghost and shouting “Boo!” during Halloween. Both Wells and Welles then encouraged Americans to worry less about Martians and more about the growing threat of Hitler and the war in Europe.
I’ve shared this before but this just seems like the time to share it again. Here, for Halloween Eve, is the 1938 Mercury Theater On The Air production of The War of the Worlds!
Released in 1958, How To Make A Monster is a clever little horror satire from American International Pictures in which the stars of Teenage Werewolf and Teenage Frankenstein are hypnotized into believing that they actually are the monsters that they played! The main culprit is a movie makeup artist (Robert H. Harris) who has been deemed obsolete by the new bosses at AIP.
Dawn of the Dead (1978, dir by George Romero, DP: Michael Gornick)
Dario Argento not only produced and edited the European cut for 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, he also introduced George Romero to Goblin. The Italian band, famous for their horror movie soundtracks, provided the classic score to Dawn of the Dead.
(Admittedly, the score is is used far more prominently in Argento’s cut of the film than in Romero’s.)
For today’s horror song of the day, here is Goblin’s Main Theme From Dawn of the Dead.
