by the pricking of my thumb, something bloggy this way comes

A character from John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness peers deep into this Halloween-themed blogpost...

October can be among the best of times for film fans and cineastes, but how's the busy wage-earner/student/cat burglar supposed to stay ahead of the genre curve? Never fear, yo - the Booth is here. Though money may be short, thankfully art is long, and we can help you stay scared in these waning days of the Halloween season with some of our personal horror and thriller faves.

Dex's picks

Creepshow (1982) - A George Romero-Stephen King collaboration from the early 1980s with a cast sent from fanboy-heaven (Ed Harris, Gaylen Ross, Leslie Nielsen, Adrienne Barbeau, Hal Holbrook, David Gale, E.G. Marshall, Tom Savini, and King himself, among others), Creepshow is a loving homage to E.C. Comics, ingeniously conceived, with a witty script from King at the height of his powers. I'm still at a loss as to why it still manages to be so woefully underrated, but I have to assume many horror fans were (and are) no doubt looking for something mind-blowing and intense, put off by the film's light touch - it's a shame, since vignettes three and four of Creepshow, "The Crate" and "They're Creeping Up on You" are among the best things Romero (or King) have ever done.

Safe (1995) - Todd Haynes brings his tale of suburban anomie and bodily dissociation filtered through ecological panic to a slow burn early...and lets it simmer..and...simmer. What will happen? Who knows! We've ruined the planet, we're all alone, we're all doomed, and nothing we do can save ourselves or our loved ones, no matter where we hide or how much money we spend. Happy Halloween!

Prince of Darkness (1987) - John Carpenter managed to make a perfect horror flick for Reagantime - Jesus is an alien, Satan's in a jar, and all around us, devil-possessed homeless and hot California winds - that managed to be stark, lean and far-out and trippy all at the same time, confounding critics and audiences. But next to The Thing (1982), this middle installment of John Carpenter's "Apocalypse Trilogy" remains one of his best pure horror films, something that's still unnerving to see 20 years on.


Joaquin's picks

Peeping Tom - Michael Powell - UK - 1960
Psycho made a bunch of money while Peeping Tom destroyed a director’s career. Equal to Hitchcock’s visual genius yet far more sophisticated in its depiction of homicidal pathology, Powell’s serial killer movie is less interested in toying with spectator/character identification and more interested in revealing cinema’s inherent fascination with sadistic voyeurism and murder. This is by far one of the creepiest films I’ve ever seen.

2001: A Space Odyssey - Stanley Kubrick - USA - 1968
Although this is obviously one of, if not the greatest science fiction movie of all time, I consider it one of the greatest horror films of all time. There’s something about mankind’s unwavering toil to “advance” itself back to a stage of infancy that I find enthralling and truly terrifying. Living inside a talking computer suspended in outer space is my idea of horror.

Thirteen - Catherine Hardwicke - USA - 2003
We live in a sick, sad and twisted nation and it’s all aimed at our female youth. If and when you have a daughter of your own, you will understand why I consider this a horror movie; it scared the bejesus out of me. Be afraid. Be very afraid of your little girl’s teenage years.


Patrick picks

Mother's Day - Total trash, and yet I can't stop renting it every few years after the initial seven or eight times I saw it back in the 80's. The short version: three college friends reunite for a camping trip in an ill-chosen stretch of woods populated by "Mother" and her two idiotic sons who she's trained since childhood to protect her from "Queenie," her beast-like sister who may or may not even exist. The women are kidnapped, brutalized, escape, and exact their revenge, following the classic exploitation formula. But performances, dialogue, and set design of Mother's house are so great (for me) that they rise above most of the competing objets d'trash from the era.

Nosferatu - 1979, the Herzog remake of the Murnau classic. Kinski is as classic as Schreck in the role and Bruno Ganz is way more intriguing. I also like that Herzog changes the end to keep the film in line with the absolute aura of dread that permeates the whole enterprise. See the original, sure, but this one's way more empty and filled with despair for my money.

Day of the Dead - Until the recent couple of Dead films, this was widely considered the worst of the series (maybe still is?). But I love it and have fond memories, partly because my friend and I snuck in to see it. Well, we didn't exactly sneak in, but we were 16 and the film was released without a rating, meaning that no one under 17 could go, period. So we went to Aurora Mall to see it, held our licenses about 6 feet away from the girl working the booth and she (kindly) let us in anyway, even though there's no possible way she could've made out our birthdates. For that I got to see a man torn in half, a group of unpleasant people screaming at each other for two hours, a muddled ending (a dream? not a dream?) and a totally hopeless and bleak vision of zombie apocalypse that in retrospect is quite apropos to the middle of the Reagan era. I love it. Love it love it love it.


Andrew's picks

All I have to say is this:

An American Werewolf in London is the greatest horror flick ever.

we can't stop here - this is blog country! : bruiser, inside, gonzo: the life and work of hunter s. thompson

Do not fuck with Beatrice Dalle, yo. No, don't, dude. Don't.

Bruiser (2000.) - Originally touted as a comeback film of sorts for George Romero, who at the time hadn't directed a film since 1993's The Dark Half, a middling adaptation of an even worse Stephen King story, Bruiser would turn out to be considerably less (indeed, America's Best Horror Filmmaker wouldn't get his sea legs back until the prescient, po-mo Land of the Dead in 2005): in essence, the flick's a "Tales From the Darkside" script stretched thin over an hour and a half, with little of the entertainment value and a surprisingly garbled mish mash of politics and comment, which is generally where Romero excels. Jason Flemyng plays Henry Creedlow, a put-upon ad exec at a skin mag called Bruiser, lorded over by perverted tyrant Henry Styles (Peter Stomare, who plays Styles like Larry Flynt meets Bugs Bunny). After one particularly humiliating night, Creedlow wakes up the following morning with a disturbing, ghostly white visage instead of a face, finding himself suddenly far more aware of his true circumstances, and completely liberated from the norms he'd gripped so tightly to before.

Bruiser is a good idea, but it's simply never fleshed out in any satisfying way, and Romero doesn't take any of the opportunities the story presents to surprise us or really make it interesting. Ostensibly, Bruiser's part of the serio-horrific tradition that Romero has toyed with to some success in Monkey Shines (1988), but with heavy reliance on the suspension of disbelief, shitty heavy metal soundtrack, and party scenes which are supposed to look decadent but come across like "Melrose Place," it's a turn away from big ideas and real people. This plastic, soft-core-cable-phoniness permeates the film to the point of distraction - it just doesn't have the raw edginess that generally marks Romero's work. Bruiser's no Springsteen, all Mellencamp.


Inside ("À l'intérieur") (2007.) - Atmospheric, relentless, and grim from the very start, Inside could easily be mistaken by many viewers outside of Europe as merely an effective, hyper-violent thriller that utilizes primal fears of motherhood and vulnerability - a young, widowed pregnant woman, alone on Christmas Eve (when another, rather important child was born some time ago), stalked by a mysterious, merciless stranger, another woman (Betty Blue's Beatrice Dalle dressed to kill in black corset, long Victorian skirt, and combat boots) who plainly wants the widow's still-unborn child - as its working base. However, the heart of the film contains so much more, and it's this ambition and clarity of vision which elevates the film to the status of a minor horror classic: the real story Inside is telling is about pull and tug of racial oppression and violence that have unfortunately characterized the "inside" of the country of liberty, fraternity, and equality over the last decade or so, culminating in the riots that burned up in the Paris suburbs in 2005. As Inside slowly, bloodily unwinds, the ethnically vague Dalle goes from Freudian monster to a Foucaltian one, a political-metaphor-in-Pinhead-drag whose ugly, brutal actions scream out that the personal dishonesty and disinterest of the Parisian power structure (crucially, the young widow is a photojournalist, her friend and guardian a bored magazine editor) simply don't deserve France's future - in her own mad and broken way, she cares enough to do violence on its behalf.

I have no idea if the Dimension Extreme disc carries any background on the Franco-Arab situation, though producers of future releases may be wise to include some theory or commentary tracks with a solid background to give the movie more context - Inside's big flaw is that the film's subtle politics are drowned in all that Grand Guignol. It battered this hardy viewer, overwhelming me to the point that the person I was watching the movie with had to point out the passionate plea that forms the subtext.

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson. (2008.) - Documentary director Alex Gibney's latest offering represents an odd choice. Gibney had managed to wring a powerful and symbolic story of what happens when standards and communities yield to rapacious, wounded egos, politics, and greed in a personal fave, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005), and walk back the tale of one man's murder at the hands of soldiers in Afghanistan into an indictment of the emerging paradigm of a "global war on terror" in the Oscar-winning Taxi to The Dark Side (2007); HST, who seems to live in most people's heads these days as a drug-addled Johnny Depp, doesn't seem like much of a story in this respect. But if there was any director who could uncover the real Hunter, it would have to be Gibney, yes?

Unfortunately, the answer is no. While Gibney correctly, entertainingly identifies the defining role eating, breathing, and writing politics had for Hunter, and we may have a bigger sense of the work of Hunter Thompson, we come away with very little of his life at the end of the flick. One gets the idea Gibney was trying to redefine Hunter away from what HST called "the drug book," but then why lean so much on footage from the movie about the drug book? What about the formative experiences - the Free Speech movement in Berkley, friendships with Allen Ginsberg, the peak highs and terrible lows - which had to have contrasted so well with HST's appetites for motorcycles, drugs, and music - of freelancing, "in the middle 60s?" What about a fuller, more real sense of Sandy Thompson, who had been Hunter's rock? What's this "American Dream" people in the movie keep yammering on about - if it existed for the Doc, what was that for him? What about his own political ambitions after the fateful McGovern campaign of 1972? And finally, what about Hunter's own goals for himself - alternately loathing and promoting the persona of the Gonzo journalist, while always, always, brooding over his desire to be a "real" writer, a "man of letters," like his hero F. Scott Fitzgerald?

It's insane to expect to distill a man or woman's life into two hours, or even two and a half, and Gibney must be given credit for the fine job he does identifying the major political events of Hunter's life, and just how much of an impact they had for him personally and as a writer. But I kept thinking of another recent doc on another complex and controversial writer, John Dullagan's 2003 film, Bukowski: Born into This, which managed to connect audiences to a bigger picture - that, like every single one of us, Hank was a whole lot of things to a whole lot of people, and that the writer's life, especially one so scrutinized, is never an easy one to track; Dullagan, aware of all of these competing personages, gave viewers a sense of that complexity, that Buk "wasn't just."

Hunter Thompson wasn't just the drug book guy or the political guy or the anti-social gun guy. He was all of those things, and because of this he was a whole lot more. Gibney's Thompson is certainly smarter, more passionately involved than what a lot of people may assume today, but the guy we see in this film isn't any more real.