by ·Comments Off on The Black Phone (2021, Scott Derrickson)

Set in 1978 Denver, this is one of those movies where the bulk of the effort was put not into scares or the story making sense, but in lovingly recreating 1978 Denver. Young “Albert” Finney is a bullied baseballer schoolkid with a typically drunk/abusive dad (Jeremy Davies of Spanking the Monkey), when all the kids in town start getting abducted by Ethan Hawke, who then grabs Finney. Now the kid has to escape from the basement before he gets murdered.

Best part of the movie is Grabber’s mask, which has a different expression every time we see it. Worst part is the titular phone, through which the kid’s dead classmates call and offer clues that help him escape, while the police are being as useless as they were in Weapons. Why did Grabber even install that ghost phone down there? Glad to see Ziggy as Grabber’s brother, a conspiracy nut who lives above the child-dungeon and gets killed for discovering it (?). I was only half paying attention, playing with my new glasses. Derrickson initiated the direct-to-DVD era of the Hellraiser franchise, and this is at least his second Ethan Hawke missing-children serial-killer movie after Sinister.

by ·Comments Off on Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026, Jane Schoenbrun)

Self-analyzing cinema, Scream without the thrills. Kids in the Hall sense of humor with stunt-cast harbinger Kevin McDonald. “There is a hole at the bottom of the lake where the movies come from.” Sleepaway Camp and Friday the 13th both exist within this movie, they’re both mentioned, but they’re also ripped off (Friday sequel titles, Sleepaway closing shot) by the fake Miasma franchise. The middle quarter of this is just Camp Miasma Part 1, featuring a long-take massacre to Counting Crows’ A Long December, which has never felt longer: digital kills combined with film texture and VHS love (return of the Videodrome flesh slot from TV Glow). I liked it, of course – the fantasy of going inside your favorite horror franchise to make out with Gillian Anderson.

by ·Comments Off on Obsession (2025, Curry Barker)

First the Spielberg and now this: the summer movies love to reference The Rehearsal. It’s never subtle either – our guy is delivering his romantic confession to a stranger, practicing to unleash the real thing on his bar trivia friend. The point is to set up how hopelessly awkward he is, so terribly bad at verbal communication (and decisions in general) that he can barely make a phone call or talk to his actual friends, so when things get uncomfortably supernaturally murdery, he’s even worse. The movie gets in a couple of good jokes about this, but unfortunately it’s a pretty dialogue-heavy story and we’re stuck with him for the endurance. Hopefully the kids will get over their love of terrible awkwardness and we can swing back to coherence.

Should Obsession 2 be Stick-and-Stacks or ChromaScope?

Great performance by Inde Navarrette, the bar trivia friend who becomes a horrifyingly clingy girlfriend after Bar Trivia Bear makes a wish that she’d love him. Apparently the real Inde is locked away in some hell dimension, replaced by the singlemindedly obsessed Girlfriend Inde until one of them dies. I noted the early setup of “I’ve got pills that’ll kill you” and “I know where dad keeps his gun” sidelined for 80 minutes, until they become Bear’s prime suicide options. The wishing thing is great, folding the supernatural into the everyday as smoothly as Weapons did. Best friends/casualties include the cute smart girl who actually likes him, and his doofy bestie Cooper – fortunately only young people get butchered, so Andy Richter is left alone.

Apparently there was much discourse, and most people (Sicinski, Marsh) disliked it, but my most trustworthy horror guy Adam Nayman said it was pretty good, so I watched it on the exercise bike, and it was pretty good.

by ·Comments Off on Backrooms (2026, Kane Parsons)

Chiwetel is divorced and depressed, living in his discount furniture shop, until he discovers a world beneath the world, with layers and layers of increasingly corrupted copies of the ground floor, like Us squared. Text is reversed or mutated, everything’s clipping into the walls, people have the wrong number of eyes, like a discount AI office park. Chiwetel gets his employees involved in documenting and mapping (leading to too much period-accurate VHS footage), then they disappear in there.

Every horror movie needs a couple of dummies to kill off. These two are TV stars from Shrinking (also about a therapist) and the Jodie Foster season of True Detective:

Anyone who has played dungeon games on Apple II knows how to deal with the backrooms:

Cut to the perspective of his therapist Renate, who makes a solo wellness check and manages to find Chiwetel, who is thriving in the backrooms. But she should’ve realized from the crayon wall drawings that her patient had gone ’round the bend, and he should’ve realized that the movie’s gonna become a therapy-backstory drama for a while. He tries to escape this by kidnapping her and showing her around to his new (edible) friends.

Finally we get back to proper horror when Carl is eaten by Giant Pirate Carl, who chases the therapist through ever more messed-up environments, until her apparent rescue by some white guys. We’ve seen these guys before, running their own backrooms explorations, setting up A/V equipment and apparently alarm-activated canisters of gas-that-does-nothing. Movie ends with her being interrogated by Phil, who does not imply that she’ll be safe or released, reminding me of the “rescue” at the end of 28 Years Later.

by ·Comments Off on Return to Silent Hill (2026, Christophe Gans)

Opening scene is so lousy, but the colors are bright, I remember liking the first movie (and that’s all I remember about it) and there’s promise of a Pyramid Head monster (which is also what I’ve been calling the pileated woodpeckers buzzing around the cabin), so, keeping an open mind.

Ivor Novello (Benediction) meets the lovely Mary (a horror regular, of various Saws and Purges). Flash-forward, she is dead because he’s such a bad driver (this is his defining character trait), but still sends him a letter to return to their home, which is an increasingly dodgy-digi-fx place. I think he has Trauma, and his personal Silent Hill is inside the mind – an ash-covered town, the local duplex playing Jacob’s Ladder and The Tenant. It’s one of those Shutter Island (or Jacob’s Ladder) stories where an empty man gradually figures out who he is/was.

Love at the bottom of the sea:

Some people attempted to write a normal movie review, focusing on what is actually in the movie, most of which sucks, while people with internet madness are predictably calling it a perfect film from a master stylist, or the most affecting onscreen portrait of grief ever filmed. Me, I am postponing plans to rewatch part one this SHOCKtober.

Me, going out to tape Smashing Pumpkins at the Metro:

Metro security, spotting my gear:

by ·Comments Off on Poltergeist (1982, Tobe Hooper)

The perfect 1980s movie. Mom smokes pot while dad reads a Reagan book. The family is snacking constantly! Family members are introduced while asleep, the dog making the rounds of the household eating snacks out of their hands and beds, and then no amount of haunting can make them lose their appetites. Horror movie I watched at a formative time and haven’t really revisited in forty years – fortunately it holds up.

First casualty is the family bird, who dies before we even meet her. The chairs-move-by-themselves bit escalates quickly to the tree/clown/closet/TV horror night, then the family calls in a university team (led by Beatrice Straight of Chiller) who faithfully documents the haunting but is in way over their heads. When the house gets too dangerous the other two kids are sent away and the great Zelda Rubinstein is summoned to provide self-contradictory advice, successfully rescuing Carol Anne from the TV dimension. Then they do not leave the house immediately: Coach Dad takes a late meeting at work (the real estate company that built the neighborhood on a graveyard) while the house attempts to eat the others. Then in part two they’re followed by an evil preacher and Coach gets possessed by a tequila worm, and part three was maybe set in a city parking garage? Maybe we’ll revisit these next shocktober.

The member of the research team who decided not to come back:

Mom is JoBeth Williams of The Big Chill:

by ·Comments Off on Candyman 3 (2021, Nia DaCosta)

All along I thought this was a remake, but it’s full of references to the events in the Bernard Rose movie, so it’s either part three or a rebooted part two (nobody remembers Farewell to the Flesh, which starred some girl from The Gate). Bookended with scenes of murderous cops, artist Morpheus (The Matrix 4) learns from Colman Domingo that he was the bonfire baby from the first movie, so he becomes the new Candyman, his girl Lysistrata (Chi-Raq) along for the ride. I guess every generation has its own Candyman, and somehow bees are involved. Victims include an art curator and his Joy Division girl, a new white lady reporter, and a bathroom full of high school girls. A real obvious movie, but so was the original, and I like this one’s look (and love the shadow puppetry) so I declare them both to be Pretty Good.

Yankee… hotel…

by ·Comments Off on Candyman (1992, Bernard Rose)

Virginia “V-Mad” Madsen (Highlander II: The Quickening) is researching urban legends with friend Kasi Lemmons (Vampire’s Kiss), who almost sinks the movie as the rational best friend trying to hold back V-Mad from her suicidal quest. Rose and his Roeg-ian DP get some good light and imagery, but between the Philip Glass score and Tony Todd’s voice, the soundtrack is the star. Movie seems to get going when she’s beaten up in the bathrooms by a fake Candyman, but soon afterwards she awakens in Vanessa Williams’s apartment with a dead dog, a missing baby, and a knife in her hand, she’s on her way towards becoming an urban legend herself, starting with her faithless husband Trevor (a cop in The Guardian). Much is made of this movie’s themes of racial violence and gentrification, but little is said about how the backstory murder scene has Ted Raimi in it.

Fake Candyman:

Real Candyman:

It’s All For You, Damien:

by ·Comments Off on Freddy’s Dead (1991, Rachel Talalay)

Opens with a Nightmare at 20,000 Feet scenario.

After a teenage apocalypse, 24 year-old Shon is the last living teenager in Ohio.

Fred keeps wizard-of-ozzing him, until Amnesiac Shon thinks he is the Anti-Freddy Messiah, then he gets dropped from a height onto a bed of spikes.

Dream Therapist Yaphet Kotto and Lisa “sister of Billy” Zane are counselors bringing a fresh batch of doomed teens to Freddytown. They immediately run into Roseanne and Tom Arnold, a bad sign.

Deaf Ricky Dean Logan (Back to the Future Part II) is given faulty hearing aids and his head explodes.

Gamer Breckin Meyer (of Skeet Ulrich thriller Touch) goes inside the television and gets Super Mario’d in a series highlight.

Boxer Lezlie Deane (of 976-EVIL) maybe survives along with the counselors?

Comin’ at ya:

Little Fred turned bad because his father was Alice “Prince of Darkness” Cooper. Now he’s dead, like the title says. They got him with a grenade, he’s dead for sure.

Talalay followed up with video store staples Ghost in the Machine (a mashup of Lawnmower Man with Pulse 1988) and Tank Girl.

Comin’ at ya: