October 31
#28 House of Dracula (1945)
#29 God Told Me To (1975)
#30 Madhouse (1974)
#31 Bedlam (1946)
#32 Feast (2006)
#33 Halloween (2007)

It’s all a blur to me now, as I stagger out of bed to set all the clocks back one hour, and notice the plastic cauldron stuffed with candy still sitting on the coffee table, and the dining room table crammed with more bags of unused candy; and there are horror DVDs scattered about the living room.  What happened?  I must piece it together.  I do recall waking and then refraining from films for Halloween morning – I believe I accomplished the act of laundry.  But after breakfast and a shower, it began around 11:30 – I decided to watch a Universal horror, I remember that now, because I hadn’t seen any of the classic monsters all month long.  So I watched House of Dracula, one of the last Universal monster mashes, and a movie I should have seen before, since it was sitting on my shelf, but although the idea of Dracula (John Carradine) seeking out a doctor (Onslow Stevens) to cure his vampirism certainly rang a bell, the majority of this film felt new to me.  Not fresh, mind you.  Interesting timing that Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney, Jr.) should arrive at the doctor’s castle seeking a cure for his own problem – becoming the Wolf Man – at the exact same time as Dracula; curious, too, that the doctor has a hunchbacked assistant, albeit a beautiful female one (disappointingly, her name is not Igora).  Later the doctor discovers Frankenstein’s monster (Glenn Strange) and seeks to revive it, although his stated reason – to discover the secret of immortality – makes no sense, since Dracula has just turned him into a vampire (secret discovered!).  But with so many monsters, and so much fun, who has time for plot?  Then I watched an episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, to further the holiday mood, and this too involved a vampire, one working as a call girl in Los Angeles.  If I recall, this was extemely funny.  I – couldn’t have watched another movie right away, could I? – no, I walked the dogs.  I did some house chores.  I watched God Told Me To, an early Larry Cohen (Q: The Winged Serpent) film about a number of bizarre mass murders, all of them committed spontaneously and with no apparent motive, except that the perpetrators claim, “God told me to.”  A cop (Tony Lo Bianco), religious to the core but with a troubled personal life, is the first to see the connection between the crimes, and pursues the cause until he receives a very bizarre supernatural answer.  They recently remade Cohen’s It’s Alive, but should have tackled this one instead.  Cohen reveals a big twist far too early, could have spent a bit more time exploring the theological question in the film – which dates back, as the film reminds us, to Abraham being asked by God to sacrifice his son Isaac – and certainly lets the plot get muddled by the time the climax arrives; still, fans of 70’s grindhouse should watch, as it’s weird as all get-out.  As for the Amicus picture Grindhouse, starring Vincent Price, Peter Cushing, and Robert Quarry, I would suggest giving a pass.  Oh, it was amicable (sorry) entertainment while making dinner and not paying a great deal of attention, but this late-period Price exploiter, in which he plays an aging horror star whose alter ego, Dr. Death, appears to be murdering cast and crew members of his new TV show, is padded out far too much by clips from older Price AIP films.  I did enjoy an appearance by Brit hottie Linda Hayden (Taste the Blood of Dracula), even if she is murdered almost as soon as she arrives. 

After dinner, we walked from the Madhouse into Bedlam, as the Val Lewtonathon concluded.  Boris Karloff plays the warden of the notorious mental institution, the Bethlehem Royal Hospital in London, in the 18th century; the inimitable Anna Lee (King Solomon’s Mines) plays Nell Bowen, society girl whose proud defiance and insults toward Karloff and her benefactor, Lord Mortimer (Billy House), find her admitted against her will to the hospital.  By far the classiest of all the Lewton films, it’s a riveting social drama, with appropriate eerie touches (including a memorably grim comeuppance for Karloff), and a script which, in its best moments, is worthy of Oscar Wilde.  But enough of class.  Feast is Project Greenlight’s only horror film, and although it’s said to be the best film the reality-TV series produced, this is pretty disposable stuff.  It’s yet another monster movie utilizing the “siege” scenario which was so effective in the hands of George A. Romero and John Carpenter, but is pretty standard-issue by now; in fact, the lower-profile Splinter, which I reviewed earlier this month, is actually more compelling than this, even though some could argue it’s less inventive.  Splinter had fun with its concept while playing the action with a straight face.  Sometimes, that’s all I ask for.  Feast, on the other hand, is a “horror comedy” which is far too smug to provide real laughs.  There’s nothing less funny than a guy who thinks he’s the funniest guy in the room.  Feast certainly offers the most repulsive monsters I’ve ever seen in a motion picture, but I’ll take The Return of the Living Dead over this, thanks; that one is funny. 

The current genre trend in Hollywood is to stop with the countless sequels and “reboot” the franchise instead (that, and to remake every horror film made between 1975 and 1985).  Think for a moment that there was once a sequel to Halloween called Halloween: H20.  Yes, there is nothing more frightening than Halloween Water.  That was not actually the twentieth Halloween film, but it might as well have been: John Carpenter’s original is now considered a horror classic, and it served as a template for all slashers which arrived in its wake, but its strength was efficiency.  It was short, it was simple, and there was no explanation for the boogey man (known in the credits as “The Shape,” but better known to all as Michael Myers); he escaped from the asylum, he slaughtered some teens, and then he disappeared.  So understandably many were upset when Rob Zombie signed on to direct the inevitable “reboot.”  The 1978 Halloween is not, they would argue, House of 1000 Corpses, and Zombie’s white-trash, film-junkie aesthetic always splits fans right down the middle.  Further, there is always the apprehension that an inferior remake might overshadow the original, somehow replace it, or at the least be viewed by younger folks who would never then seek out the source.  I only read negative fan reaction to Zombie’s Halloween, but maybe that says more about the message boards I read than what people thought on the whole; after all, Zombie did just release a sequel.  But of all the remakes, reboots, and reiterations, this one serves as an interesting study in honoring the original while opening it up and, in a strange way, defying it.  Consider that the original Halloween is here, almost in its entirety, with some shots recreated with great specificity (such as Myers cocking his head curiously at the victim he’s just pinned to the wall with a knife).  But this storyline does not begin until a full hour into the film.  The first hour is, essentially, an expansion of the opening few minutes of Carpenter’s film.  The prologue of the original Halloween famously featured a subjective tracking shot from a very young Michael as he invades a house, puts on a mask and fetches a kitchen knife, spies upon a young woman and then slaughters her.  Zombie includes this minus the POV shot, but expands not only the body count but everything else: his film actually opens with the young Michael being taunted by his mother’s boyfriend and his older sister, and bullied by the kids at school.  We learn that he has a history of killing small animals.  Then we see his first murder, when he isolates one of those bullies in the woods and clubs him to death with a tree branch.  Perhaps emboldened by the crime, he turns his retribution upon his own household.  A child psychiatrist, Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance in the original, ably replaced by Malcolm McDowell here), was already looking into Michael’s case before the crimes were committed, and so, for the next fifteen years, he studies Michael and authors a book about him.  He’s fascinated by Michael’s obsession with wearing masks, and also by his complete absence of emotion – the “void” that seems to be lurking behind all those masks.  As we expect, eventually a grown-up Michael (now played by wrestler Tyler Mane, Troy’s Ajax) escapes from imprisonment and journeys to Haddonfield, where he terrorizes teenager Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) and her two girlfriends, with Loomis in pursuit.  Although Carpenter opened his film with a POV shot, it was a cheat: he never actually asked us to empathize with Michael Myers or to understand him in any way whatsoever.  For the rest of Carpenter’s Halloween, Michael Myers was, in fact, “The Shape,” a figure glimpsed out of a classroom window or down the sidewalk, always a distant watcher until he finally began his relentless attack, with that painted-white, nondescript face mask and its shadowy eye-holes.  Zombie’s remake drew ire partly because he substituted the POV trick-shot with real perspective on Michael Myers’ childhood.  Many simply did not want to know where Michael came from, the promiscuity which surrounded him (his bullies tease him because his mother is a stripper; his sister has sex while her mother’s boyfriend dozes in front of the TV downstairs), or the fact that he liked to kill rats.  But it should be noted that despite all of this “explanation,” Michael is still, as Dr. Loomis tells us, unknowable.  He is still The Shape, even without his mask.  In fact, he is the mask, which is why Michael is only comfortable when he’s wearing it.  The first hour of the film might just be set-up, but it’s still compelling, and when we suddenly switch to Haddonfield and the familiar Laurie Strode, we smile, because Zombie suddenly announces what he’s doing: now let’s watch the original film and see how it plays.  Here he becomes almost rigidly faithful to Carpenter, although, being Rob Zombie, he ramps up the sex and nudity.  As for the violence, in this portion of the film it doesn’t seem to me that much more grisly than Carpenter’s (almost bloodless) original, though at least one of the killings reminded me of The Devil’s Rejects in how it emphasizes the desperation and agony of its victim.  One thing I’ve always liked about Rob Zombie’s films is that he doesn’t let us forget that dying is a horrible thing.  He’s not interested in the makeup effects and the gimmick-kills of, say, the Friday the 13th franchise.  He’s more invested in the horror generated by a realistic portrayal of murder.  I watched the uncut version of Zombie’s film, which runs 121 minutes and feels it.  Now, the real question should be: is Carpenter’s Halloween even worthy of this kind of epic treatment?  The plot is still threadbare.  Carpenter’s film was lean and mean; Zombie’s is not just sprawling, but self-conscious in its schematic construction.  His is almost a shrine to the original, like the tombstone which Myers lugs around; but, critically, in the second half Zombie undercuts Carpenter’s intentions deliberately, and it’s a decision that will make or break the film to horror fans.  In Zombie’s vision, Laurie is an adopted daughter of the Strodes, and in reality she is Michael’s baby sister, whom he refused to harm when he went on his first massacre.  The whole reason he returns to Haddonfield – 100 miles away – is to find her again.  This would be the other reason this film drew so much ire.  But after my initial surprise, I found myself enjoying the twist, simply because he needed something to justify the length of the film.  When watching the original, I’m terrified by Myers’ unstoppable assault on Laurie and her friends; in the remake, I’m just exhausted.  But drawing some kind of connection between the two of them adds just enough emotional resonance to spark this corpse back to life (and just when rigor mortis was settling in).  Is Rob Zombie’s Halloween a great film?  No, certainly not.  Does it replace or overshadow the original?  Far from it.  But Rob Zombie’s films are always worth watching, because despite his occasional puerile impulses, he also has the instincts of a natural filmmaker.  Most importantly, he’s always interested in the story he’s telling and the characters who inhabit it.  There are scenes in this film of Laurie babysitting, joking around with her young charge, which are far more believable and realistic (and warm) than anything in Carpenter’s film.  I would also point out a brief moment right after Michael stabs his older sister.  While she looks at him in shock, Zombie cuts to a close-up of Michael’s eyes peering through the mask’s holes, looking at her curiously, almost introspectively, as though he’s trying to figure out how he feels about this – and discovering that he doesn’t feel anything.  Carpenter was content to stare out from those eye-holes for a horrifying effect; but Zombie, looking through from the other side, gives us a brief glimpse of the amorality behind Michael Myers, and it’s at least as horrifying, because he’s still The Shape intact.

Halloween is over.  I stagger away from the TV, I type these words, I vow never to do it again.  I meant to do thirty-one, I did thirty-three!  But give me a few days, and I’ll probably change my mind.