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You are interested in the unknown... the mysterious. The unexplainable. That is why you are here. And now, for the first time, we are bringing to you the full story of what happened on that fateful day. We are bringing you all the evidence, based only on the secret testimony, of the miserable souls who survived this terrifying ordeal. The incidents, the places. My friend, we cannot keep this a secret any longer. Let us punish the guilty. Let us reward the innocent. My friend, can your heart stand the shocking facts of The October Horror Movie Challenge?

One of the message boards I frequent was once again running a horror movie challenge in honor of Halloween. The objective: watch 31 horror movies over the 31 days of October with 16 of those viewings, or half, being movies that are new viewings. Here's how my month went. New-to-me movies in blue. Some of these have longer reviews linked to them.

October 1:

Isle of the Dead (1945, d. Mark Robson)--This is the Val Lewton film with which I am the least familiar. I saw it once many years ago on cable, then never got around to it again, even after I bought the Val Lewton laserdisc box. Lewton built his films around set-piece sequences and this one has a doozie, in which a cataleptic woman is entombed alive. The sequence is largely silent, but for the blowing of the wind on the soundtrack. The rest of the movie is watchable, but it doesn't overreach itself. I like the film's use of Arnold Bocklin's painting, from which the film takes its title, and Karloff is superb as the general who succumbs to plague and superstition.

Jigoku (1960, d. Nobuo Nakagawa). Weird film depicting a collision of western notions of hell with Buddhist notions of hell. In the first half, sinners sin. In the second, they pay for their sins in hell. In a lot of ways, this plays out like one of those Jack Chick religious mini-comics, with all their outrageous moral rectitude. But this is infinitely weirder.

October 2:

Tower of London (1962, d. Roger Corman)--A film I've consistently missed over the years, and one that doesn't repay the effort of catching up to it. This is Shakespeare without the Shakespeare, a film that completely misses the fascination of Richard of Gloucester, robs him of his charm and guile, and puts him in the hands of a completely miscast Vincent Price. That this is one of Price's most over-the-top performances only makes things worse. Danny Haller's sets are awfully nice though.

October 3:

Ju-On: The Grudge (2003, d. Takashi Shimizu)--Too much, too early, with too little explanation. I realize that this is the third in a sequence, but a little help here? Wonky chronology of scenes doesn't help clarify things. Can a horror movie without subtext terrify? That's what this film seems to be asking. Feh.

Lifeforce (1985, d. Tobe Hooper)--A career-shaking body blow to just about everyone involved, this is a mess of a movie. And yet...it's compulsively watchable none the less. Lots of special effects in this, including some very interesting space vampires in "bat" form, but it's all upstaged by the nekkid wonder of Mathilda May and her perfect interglactic breasts. Yum.

October 4:

I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958, d. Gene Fowler Jr.)--There are hints in the details of a film with considerable resources (look at the way the camera moves in the opening shot, for example), but the story here, a variant of the aliens among us trope mashed-up with the most vivid bug-eyed monster rape fantasies from pulp sci fi magazine covers, is strictly dime-store. Some parts of this act as a wry satire of fifties mores concerning marriage, but the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

October 5:

Doppelganger (2001, d. Kiyoshi Kurosawa)--I'm not sure what I think of this film. On the one hand, I think it's a complete put-on. On the other, it retains Kurosawa's signature chilliness. Parts of it are so deadpan that it's almost hard to believe that the director is pulling the audience's leg. Strange film.

October 6:

Curse of the Crying Woman (1963, d. Rafael Baledón)--Outright thievery is on display in the opening sequence of this Mexican horror movie, in which no attempt whatsoever is made to disguise the theft of imagery from Mario Bava's Black Sunday. The rest is an entertaining generational gothic in which a young woman goes to live with her aunt, only to discover that her aunt is a witch who is attempting to resurrect the power of "The Crying Woman," a Latin American variant of the banshee. Great sets and loads of atmosphere, but the story doesn't make a lick of sense. More than that, it indulges in a peculiar kind of misogyny in the way it transforms "The Crying Woman" from a spirit that stands in for the wrongs done to women into a kind of demon.

October 7:

The Woods (2006, d. Lucky McKee)--Interesting variation on the Suspiria formula, in which a troubled young woman is packed off to a prestigious boarding school where sinister events are transpiring. Expertly filmed, with a terrific cast, but one can sense the outline of studio tampering--not surprising in a film that has been the victim of studio mergers. The end of the film trades on Bruce Campbell's cinematic anima to its detriment, and the very end doesn't work very well, but I was always interested in what I was watching. Credit the director with generating mood where another film might not bother. I'll be very interested to see what McKee can do at a studio that trusts him.

October 8:

Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932, d. Robert Florey)--Bela Lugosi at his most floridly theatrical enlivens this "adaptation" of Poe's mystery story. Exceptionally sadistic for its day, this has an overall ambience of depravity that sets it apart from its more famous contemporaries. Love that pre-Code salaciousness.

October 9:

I got nothing. I watched football.

October 10:

Seconds (1966, d. John Frankenheimer)--A film that questions the integrity of identity, this movie is so expertly shot by the great James Wong Howe, and so disorienting in its design, that I felt my own identity coming unhitched by the end of the film. The story follows an unhappy schlub who's given the opportunity to shrug off his mundane, unhappy life and start over as a new man--in this case, as Rock Hudson. But his new life is no more satisfying. There is an underlying paranoia in this film that builds up a terrific head of steam. The surgical sequences suggest that the influence of Eyes Without a Face was very broad very quickly. This is one of the few films that matches the glacial chilliness of Franju while raiding his images. A keeper, this one.

October 11:

The Heirloom (2005, d. Leste Chen)--The avalanche of Asian ghost movies continues unabated. This one, a Taiwanese entry, is a creditable haunted house story that follows a very traditional gothic formula of a bad place newly inhabited, slowly revealing its secrets. These sorts of movies rise and fall on mood and style rather than plot, and this one has mood and style to burn. The image of a hanged family that starts things and the images that derive from it are indelible and carry the movie through its more absurd plot points. It's not a great movie, but it's a joy to look at, a marvel of film craft if not film writing. Each frame is lovely, like an heirloom miniature, if you will. (note: Prospective viewers should avoid reading the opening text scroll: it robs the movie of most of its mysteries. Turn off the subtitles if you must).

October 12:

Pray (2005, d. Yuichi Sato)--Another Asian ghost movie, and not a very good one. The plot starts out as a crime thriller, in which a pair of enterprising young kidnappers abduct a young girl, only to discover that the girl they intended to abduct has been dead for a year to the day. So who did they abduct? From there, the story twists itself around into an insoluble Gordian knot, and no amount of intended "ah ha!" moments can unravel it. A jigsaw puzzle with a couple of pieces from another puzzle included to screw things up.

October 13:

The Witch's Mirror (1962, d. Chano Ureta)--At the end of this Mexican horror mash-up, the police inspector declares, "Human eyes have never seen the likes of this!" He's wrong, of course, because everything in this movie is...ahem..."borrowed" from other sources. The movie starts like an Eye-talian gothic of the period, mutates into Eyes Without a Face (natch), then into The Hands of Orlock, then into The Beast With Five Fingers, and then back into an Eye-talian gothic. Original, this is not. It is, however, hugely entertaining.

October 14:

The Haunted Palace (1963, d. Roger Corman)--One of Corman's best "Poe" movies, though it's "Poe" in name only. Based on H. P. Lovecraft, this includes a bunch of the paraphernalia of the Mythos, and STILL manages to feel like the rest of Corman's Poe films. Vincent Price is terrific, and Debra Paget is completely yummy to look at. The title sequences for Corman's Poe films were terrific, by the way--easily as evocative as the James Bond titles--and this has one of the best scores of all of Corman's films. Paul Verhoeven swiped the title sequence of this film for The 4th Man, though that's neither here nor there. Longer review here.

October 15:

Ab-Normal Beauty (2005, d. Oxide Pang)--Having seen several of the Pang Brothers' movies now, I'm convinced that, were they to found an ad agency, they would thrive. Their films have that slick, but empty sheen of a car commercial. They got away with it on The Eye, but here, they can't seem to get beyond the photographic image in a way that makes it talk. This is particularly troubling because the film takes repulsive photographic images as its major theme, one compromised by the presentation. Am I the only one who thinks that casting real-life twin sisters Race and Roseanne Wong as unrelated lesbian lovers is borderline creepy?

Matango: The Attack of the Mushroom People (1964, d. Ishiro Honda)--An old favorite, one with particular relevance to me, given that I'm dangerously allergic to mushrooms. What's a little anaphalaxis between friends, eh?

October 16:

The Black Pit of Dr. M (1959, d. Fernando Méndez)--Once again, the phrase "mash-up" comes immediately to mind. I'm beginning to think of these Mexican horror movies as "Cuisinart movies." Take a dozen disparate plot elements, stick them in a blender, press "puree." While there is a "Dr. M" in this movie, there is no Black Pit--blame the American distributors for the title. The Twilight Zone-y plot finds a pair of doctors making a deal to communicate with each other from beyond the grave, the one to let the other know if there's a way back to this mortal coil. There is, but it's convoluted, involving ghosts, mad science, a madhouse, a deformed plastic surgery victim, a murder, an execution, and a grave. How these films pack so much into 80 minute running times is a thing to see...

October 17:

The Mysterians (1957, d. Ishiro Honda)--Ah, yes...alien invaders ravaged by atomic war demand our women so they can repopulate their race. What would sci fi be without this plotline? Made a couple of years after Gojira, this movie is Ishiro Honda and his collaborators (most notably, composer Akira Ifukube) finding their metier. The movie is chock-a-block full of (mostly convincing) fantasies of destruction, this time in full color and widescreen. The movie does have one of the dippier-looking giant robots, but you can't have everything, I suppose. Say...that's the great Takashi Shimura as the mentoring scientist, and, boy howdy, he keeps a straight face while uttering silly dialogue. That's professionalism for you...

October 18:

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2 (1986, d. Tobe Hooper)--There's a new edition of this out (I haven't seen it), so maybe the reassessment of this film can commence. When I first saw it in 1986, I thought it was some kind of demented masterpiece. Not in the same league as the first 'Chain Saw'--what is?--but a radically different kind of horror film than what was being made at the time by other filmmakers. Because I am wont to take a philosophical viewpoint, I think of this film as being the quintessential Nietzchean horror movie, in which the "good guys"--Dennis Hopper and Caroline Williams--gaze into the abyss only to learn that the abyss gazes also into them. By revisiting Leatherface's final chain saw dance from the first film, but by replacing Leatherface with his primary victim, Hooper has turned the films that take their inspiration from TCM completely on their head. The irony of Hooper delivering more than is suggested by the first film's "bad" reputation is not lost on me.

October 19:

The Invisible Man (1933, d. James Whale)--This is one of the funniest horror movies ever made, a visual marvel that pulls the audience's leg from the get go to disguise the fact that it's deadly serious. Claude Rains, in his first major role, plays megalomania and tragedy as two sides of the same coin. Meanwhile, the imagery is indelible. This is one of the first films where special effects REALLY become the major attraction (along with King Kong, released the same year). Some of them are still amazing. It's a tribute to the skill of James Whale that they don't overwhelm the movie. If I have a quibble, it's the annoying shrieking of Whale favorite Una O'Connor, but she's even worse in The Bride of Frankenstein, so what the hey...

October 20:

Circus of Horrors (1960, d. Sidney Hayers)--In which yet ANOTHER crazy plastic surgeon is center stage. What is it about that profession, anyway? This one is doing things on the sly with radical techniques. His patients end up in his circus, and when they try to leave...well, no one gets out alive. This is vivid and colorful, but woefully underwritten. Not bad, but not very credible, either.

October 21:

The Tomb of Ligeia (1965, d. Roger Corman)--The last of Corman's Poe movies, this one takes the camera and heads out into the English countryside where Corman and company have found some crackerjack locations. This by itself gives the film a different "feel" than the other Poe films, but the rest of the film has a different visual design too. After the wild color experiments of The Masque of the Red Death, this one dials back the color and becomes an exercise in placing bright colors in selected areas of a largely monochromatic frame. It makes for a pleasing formal exercise, and one that builds a large degree of mood, but the whole house of cards is built on a pretty standard screenplay that rehashes most of the previous films in the series. Vincent Price plays Verdan Fell, yet another variant of Roderick Usher haunted by the prospect that his dead wife will some how return from the grave. When he remaries the vivacious Lady Rowena, a woman who bears more than a passing resemblance to the dead Ligeia...well, you get the picture. The real surprise in the film is the performance by Elizabeth Shepherd, who manages to hold the frame against Price, though, admittedly, Price has restrained his usual histrionics to give her more of the film. Longer review here.

October 22:

The Braniac (1961, d. Chano Ureto)--Another Mexican horror movie made with a blender. This one starts with the Spanish (or Mexican) Inquisition executing a warlock (who, naturally) vows vengeance on the descendants of his executioners. Then it becomes an alien movie, in which a monster rides to earth on a comet. But wait--it's the warlock! In a bad rubber mask! Sucking the brains of his enemies. This one is just ridiculous, made worse by the visible limits of its special effects (not just its monster). Mind you, it's short and energetic, but good? Not so much.

October 23:

I got nothing.

October 24:

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953, d. Eugène Lourié)--The prototype for Godzilla and his kin, this Harryhausen effort is a puzzler. The special effects are superb for their day, but somehow manage to seem inferior to the gimcrack effects employed by the Japanese. The relationship this bears to its source material, Ray Bradbury's "The Foghorn," is instructive. Bradbury wrote (and still writes) a poetic prose all his own, and imbued his tale of a sea monster falling in love with the call of a foghorn with surprising poignancy. It's the poetry in the thing. This film misses the poetry. From its blank-faced mock-documentary opening onward, it's depressingly literal-minded-- which is why it doesn't resonate in the cultural echo chamber the way Godzilla does, in spite of a completely identical mix of elements. The beast here is just a beast, and the human being here are just cardboard cutouts inserted in the frame to give the special effects some scale.

October 25:

Cat O' Nine Tails (1971, d. Dario Argento)--The giallo mystery is a gray area. This subgenre has the structure of a whodunnit, the world view of film noir, and the imagery and mood of a horror movie. Within the subgenre, there is movement between these three impulses. Some of them favor one area at the expense of the others. This one, from one of the giallo's prime architects, favors the traditional whodunnit, featuring semi-professional detectives rather than amateur sleuths and playing fair with the audience. Not that the movie doesn't rampage off into odd directions--it does--but it still maintains familiar structures. Argento himself names this as his least favorite of his own movies, but I think he's wrong. There is a control of the material here that is absent in many (most?) of his films, and an interesting structure that examines the limits of our senses (Karl Malden's blind protagonist is only the most obvious signifier).

October 26:

Quills (2000, d. Philip Kaufman)--Is this a horror movie? Oh, yes. If that wonderful drop of blood falling from the blade of the guilotine in the first sequence isn't a signifier, then its central figure is. The Marquis de Sade was the black beast of the enlightenment, the monster bred by the sleep of reason. That this has other concerns besides horrifying the audience is immaterial. This movie is a film designed to unsettle one's convictions, to stir the soup until it makes your eyes water. Geoffrey Rush is brilliant as the Marquis, Michael Caine is superb as the hypocritical Dr. Collard, whose private life is the horror that de Sade describes in his writings, only hidden behind a veil of respectability. The taste of irony at the end of the film is rich, something most horror movies never attempt, alas.

October 27:

Phone (2002, d. Byeong-ki Ahn)--Accomplished Ring knock-off from Korea. Pretty good in spite of being completely derivative, but that's Korean genre cinema for you. They make up for originality with absolutely crackerjack filmcraft. Screenplay is a little convoluted, but that's okay, because this film has the creepiest little girl in all of Asia in the cast.

October 29:

Nightmare (1962, d. Freddie Francis)--I watched this Hammer Gaslight knock-off for last year's challenge. I completely forgot it between then and now. It's that kind of movie. Nice black and white photography, but one expects that from a film directed by Freddie Francis. Otherwise unremarkable.

October 30:

The Climax (1944, d. George Waggner)--Attractively mounted conflation of The Phantom of the Opera and Trilby starring a woefully under-used Boris Karloff. There are some terrific character actors in this film, including Gale Sondergaard and Thomas Gomez, but the interesting characters--including Karloff--fade into the background. In the foreground are a bunch of wet noodles and too much bad musical. The sets, left over from the remake of The Phantom, are spectacular and the Technicolor cinematography is first rate, but the film isn't worthy of them.

The Strange Door (1951, d. Joseph Pevney)--Another Karloff movie in which Karloff is reduced to a supporting player, this time backing up a Charles Laughton in full "ham" mode. The movie has a lot of plot, concerning a nobleman who's forcing his neice into an unwelcome marriage in order to torture his imprisoned brother-in-law. Lots of great atmosphere, but this isn't very scary. Were it not for the mood, it would be mistaken for a swashbuckler. Minor.

October 31:

Lunacy (2005, d. Jan Svankmajer)--The director himself introduces this latest insanity thus: "Ladies and Gentlemen, what you are about to see is a horror film—with all the degeneracy peculiar to that genre. It is not a work of art. Today, art is all but dead anyway. In its place is a kind of trailer for the reflection of the face of Narcissus. Our film may be regarded as an infantile tribute to Edgar Allen Poe, from whom I've borrowed a number of motifs. And to the Marquis de Sade, to whom the film owes its blasphemy and subversiveness." Who am I to argue? This is another of Svankmajer's assaults on the citadel of reason, combining live action with the stop-motion animation of odd, and oddly menacing, everyday objects. Particularly meat. There's a LOT of meat in this movie. If you know Svankmajer's work, and like it, this should need no introduction. If not, this will be fairly opaque. I liked it a lot, but there you are...

Final tally: 32 movies. 18 new to me. This represents an improvement over last year's tally where I barely got under the wire on both counts. I can only imagine how I'd do if I didn't have those pesky real life commitments like work and social interactions...Alas.