October Horror 2012: V/H/S

V/H/S is a recently released found footage horror anthology with segments written and directed by: David Bruckner, Ti West, Glenn McQuaid, Joe Swanberg, the directing team Radio Silence. The framing story was written and directed by Adam Wingard.  Again, expect spoilers, but I'll try to spoiler tag the juiciest bits.


The framing story is titled "Tape 56" and centers around a group of professional hoodlums who tape themselves committing various crimes like destroying lights and windows at an empty building or tearing off a woman's shirt and filming her boobs.  I think one of them was also taping himself having sex with his girlfriend but the other activities are taped over it.  They get hired by an unknown person to break into an empty house and steal a specific VHS tape.  Each other story is a tape found in the collection at the house.

Amateur Night
This segment is about 3 guys who've purchased a set of eyeglass with a hidden camera in the frames with the intention of filming themselves having sex with women they bring to their hotel room from nearby clubs.  Most of the short is filled with the lead guy being an absolute jackass and all 3 of them getting really really drunk.  Eventually they get back to their room with 2 girls, one of which looks a little weird and only ever says "I like you" to the cameraman.  The lead guy tries stripping one of the girls, but she passes out and his friends convince him not to have sex with her while she's unconscious.  So he decides to have sex with the weird looking girl while she constantly reaches for the cameraman trying to involve him.  He's too wasted from all the drinking and drugs so he goes to the bathroom while the 3rd friend strips naked and tries to initiate the threesome.  While in the bathroom the girl goes crazy and starts ripping into the leader.  The cameraman and the naked 3rd wheel try to escape but she kills nudie during the chase.  The cameraman's hand is injured and the girl is revealed to be a succubus.  She still likes the cameraman and tries to seduce him, but he's too afraid to get it up.  In a rage, she sprouts wings and flies away with him.  This short was a bit weak, I thought, because the 3 guys were absolute assholes.  Unlikable in every way.

Second Honeymoon
The next short, directed by Ti West, is the only short that doesn't involve a supernatural element.  The segment follows a hipster couple as they travel out west for their honeymoon.  There's a forshadowing fortune telling scene and an implication of a creepy character being introduced off camera.  While the couple sleeps on their first night, an unknown person sneaks into the room and wanders around with the camera.  They pull the covers off the wife and stroke her skin with a switchblade, then empties the husband's wallet, drops his toothbrush in the toilet and leaves.  This builds a lot of mistrust as the husband accuses the wife of stealing the money.  They have some stilted moments and then enjoy some time at a canyon.  The person sneaks into the room again, this time stabbing the husband in the neck.  The film cuts shortly then returns to a short shot of the wife and an unknown woman making out in the mirror, before she asks the new girl if she erased the camera.  I like Ti West and this short is pretty tense and decent.  However, it really feels like nothing happened because of Ti's signature snail-like pacing.  He also didn't have enough time to give his characters the depth he normally does.  Good show, but it stumbles.

Tuesday the 17th
This obvious play on Friday the 13th was directed by Glenn McQuaid who also directed I Sell the Dead.  The story centers around a group of friends who travel to a cabin in the woods to do the typical things.  There are some nicely creepy flashes of mutilated bodies in the footage while they tour the woods.  Out of freaking nowhere the "nice girl" starts talking about horrible things that happened.  The typical initial kills, sex offers, reveal of understanding are kindof awkward because of the tight timeframe.  The killer is actually kindof cool, he's like the love-child of Jason and Slenderman.  A supernatural slasher who uses knives but can only be seen as heavy distortions on camera.  Despite the awkward bits, I enjoyed this part as well.

The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger
This story happens entirely in webcam chats between a girl who inexplicably flashes her boobs and her boyfriend who is away at medical school.  Emily is showing off her new apartment but is complaining about strange things that go bump in the night.  Despite not believing her, the boyfriend eventually sees odd things happen on her webcam behind her.  Eventually she comes up with a plan to use him to guide her through her apartment with her eyes closed so she can try to talk to the spirit-children we've been seeing without being scared.  A few moments later she does see the children, and they attack her knocking her unconscious.  The boyfriend miraculously enters the apartment just a few seconds later and flips Emily over while the ghost kids watch.  He makes an incision in her back and removes a small alien-looking fetus thing.  He asks the ghosts how many more of those he'll have to remove from her before they stop growing back, then punches her in the face and breaks her arm.  The camera cuts to them on webcam again with her arm in a cast, telling her boyfriend about how a doctor diagnosed her with mild schizophrenia which explained the children she saw and why she ran in front of a car without remembering.  They hang up the webcam and after a short moment we see another girl on webcam with the same boyfriend.  She also flashes her boobs inexplicably.  This is probably my favorite short of the movie.  It's a little mind-bending and the scares are delivered wonderfully.

10/31/98
The final short is 4 guys who go to a Halloween party at someone's house only to find it empty.  Undeterred they wander around the house in costume looking for people or beer.  There are a few brief flashes of some sort of ghostly figure, but nothing that the characters react to.  Eventually they make it to the attic where a few hicks are trying to either exorcise or assault a woman in a nightgown.  The friends flee and make it to the door before deciding they can't not doing anything and run upstairs to save the girl.  During this bit all sorts of crazy things manifest in the house: stacked chairs, crows, projectile vases, etc.  The group makes it out with the girl and into car.  They drive away and make it a decent distance before a strange fog envelopes the car.  The girl vanishes and appears outside of the car.  The poor bros have rescued a demon or demon-possessed girl.  This short is bananas, but really fun to watch.

We now return to the framing story, which has randomly flashed in between the shorts.  During the story a supposedly deceased man in a chair had vanished from the chair.  He's undead or something and has been picking off the other criminals, and finally chases down the leader of the group.

This is a really good movie.  Some of the shorts are a little awkward, but the concept is decent and there are some standouts in Second Honeymoon, Sick Emily Thing etc, and 10/31/98.

More anthologies coming up: Trick 'R Treat

October Horror 2012: Snoop Dogg's Hood of Horror

I was not expecting much here, but this movie is actually surprisingly well put together.  Yeah, some of the acting is hammy, but it's good with its mythology and its stories have a good central theme.  The production is definitely passable.


The movie starts with a short animated sequence in which Devon, voiced by Snoop Dogg, is involved in a gang shootout during which his sister is shot and killed.  It's a strong possibility he fired the shot that killed her.  A demon named Liore offers him the chance to save his sister's life by killing himself and giving his soul to Liore.  In exchange, Liore also makes Devon a Hound of Hell: a pimp demon with the ability to offer people the choice to damn themselves or save their souls.  Snoop now appears in person and gives a short tour of hell, involving a puking midget demon.

Crossed Out
A tagger named Posie is haunted by the gang-related deaths of her parents.  After interfering with two thugs trying to make unwanted advances on a girl, she spars verbally with the leader then sprays him in the face and runs away.  She's abducted by a mysterious hobo played by Danny Trejo who drugs her and gives her a totally bitchin' skeletal tattoo on her arm.  This tattoo gives her the power to kill by tagging over people's names.  After crossing out the tag of the thug who chased her the other day, she overhears news of his untimely death and realizes she was the cause.  Drunk on power, she begins crossing out the tags of his entire band of thugs.  There's a short montage while she gleefully takes out a swarm of low level street scum.  However, after a time she begins tagging her own name and Danny appears to tell her she abused her power instead of using it to break the cycle of violence in the city.  He strips the tattoo from her and raises some of the recently deceased gang members from the dead.  They kill her, spraying her brains along a wall.  The spatter is later revealed as a beautiful painting of flowers and Snoop reappears to admire the mural with Danny before taking Posie's soul.

The Scumlord
This story concerns a bigoted white trash Texan named Tex and his trophy wife.  Tex's father ran a retirement house for 4 black war veterans whom he had served with, where he treated them with respect and friendship.  The elder Tex included a provision in his will that his son would have to live with the vets for one year so that they could teach him honor and respect before getting his inheritance.  After moving in, Tex and his wife harass and defraud the elderly veterans, led by Ernie Hudson, with the intention that they'll move out leaving him the property to flip and resell at a profit.  Unwilling to report Tex to the VA since they'll be split up, they comply with his demands.  Eventually the money he's stolen from the vets causes them to begin starving and become unable to afford their medications.  When Tex eventually kills the friendly maid/cook, the veterans decide it's their duty to retaliate.  Hudson beats Tex to death while the wife dies in a freak accident.  The veterans inherit the elder Tex's fortune and the wife's yap-yap dog, so they celebrate.  Snoop reappears and informs them that he's their new landlord before he drags off Tex's soul while the puking midget hauls off the wife.

Rapsody Askew
The final story is about a rapper, SOD, who begs God for a chance to spread His word if God just helps him gain fame.  Immediately outside of the church he meets Quon, who had just broken a window with a ball, and they instantly become partners.  Flash forward and the rapper is cleaning house at an awards show following the tragic shooting death of Quon.  During an after party he's trapped by a mysterious woman played by Lin Shaye who removes the door to the room.  She then begins to replay his life for him, culminating in the death of his friend.  A zombiefied Quon then enters the room carrying another tape, showing another perspective on the crime revealing SOD was wearing a bulletproof vest and had orchestrated the assassination with the help of his bodyguard.  Quon was constantly trying to keep SOD's ego in check and keep him from ruining his career or his life with senseless crime and hard drugs.  Even turning down a solo career to keep the team together.  The bodyguard appears as a hysteric SOD tries to tell him Quon is in the room, but he doesn't see Quon.  After the bodyguard reiterates his crime, the deceased MC then grabs two knives and shoves them into his eyes.  As SOD picks up the knives and tries to attack the undead Quon with them, two girls open the door and see SOD standing over the dead body.  The woman offers him a choice: stay in the room, go to prison for murder or leave the room and go out in a blaze of glory.  SOD grabs the bodyguard's gun and commits suicide by cop.  Snoop then appears and takes his soul to hell along with the two Texans and Posie.

I actually really liked this movie.  It's pretty dark and gruesome, with decent effects, but there's a light-hearted swagger lent to it by the tone of the framing story and some of the writing during each story's climax.  Posie's story is probably the weakest because of its timeframe.  Rapsody Askew is probably the best.  Scumlord is decent but the characterization of Tex and his wife is beyond caricature.  I understand it's done for a reason, but it's so over-the-top you have no sympathy for them at all while Posie and SOD felt more like real people done in by their own flaws.

Anyway, anthologies continues with: Campfire Tales.

October Horror 2012: Sinister

This movie didn't make the official list this year, but the previews looked really good and the festival circuit enjoyed it so we went out to a theater to see it.  Aside from a pretty vapid middle aged housewife who insisted on narrating everything that was happening on screen to her husband, who tried valiantly to make her stop, the audience was very good.


Sinister's plot centers around a true-crime writer, Ellison Oswald (Ethan Hawke) and his family, who move into a house in rural Pennsylvania while Ellison researches and writes his next novel.  Ellison has been in a bit of slump since his breakthrough hit "Kentucky Blood" and hopes his next book will put him back on top so he can retire and his family can live happily ever after. Soon, he finds a box of super 8 reels and a small projector labelled "Home Movies".  Each tape is titled with some innocuous phrase like "backyard BBQ" or "pool party", but they contain recordings of brutal family murders where the method of execution is a pun on the title.  As he watches these tapes to uncover the mystery, weirder and weirder things keep happening to him and his family.

Ellison is having a really tough time of the whole thing even outside of the haunting because his family is so absurdly antagonized by the nature of Ellison's work, they've instituted a set of strict rules involving his office which they joke about.  They have a son who suffers from sleep-walking and night terrors and a pretty normal seeming daughter who really enjoys painting, but prefers walls to canvas.  All indications are Ellison is a man who is, for all his want of money, devoted to his family and committed to keeping them safe.  Which makes it really odd that his wife constantly gives him crap over his choice of genre.  She has a tendency to support him one moment while using the same breath to deliver an ultimatum.  Aside from that issue the characters are all pretty real feeling which helps this sort of movie.

The movie itself is directed by Scott Derrickson who also directed The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which is one of my all-time favorite movies.

Sinister, I think, is probably going to be one of the better new releases this year.  It's respectful of the audience in the way that no characters really ever show up to spell out exactly what the backstory of anyone is or what the latest discovery in the central mystery is.  The conversations feel very natural, like people actually talking about things they know instead of exposition via As-You-Know-Bob.  They expect that if you've been following along you're intelligent enough to make the same breakthrough as the characters are at any step along the way.  It's also very deliberate and Insidious-like in the way it approaches its scares.  While it's heavy on jump scares they have psychological weight to them and the movie builds to them slowly and deliberately.  Another thing that's really good in here is the lack of false scares.  They will have situations where the movie is building tension and then appears to reveal something, but it's not done with a soundtrack punctuation or quick editing so the build up isn't broken and the fake out has just served to get you on edge expecting the scare.

The super 8 tapes are a really good use of traditional found footage, incorporated into a narrative instead of the whole movie being "found".  Another bit that I really liked about it was the way they used a super 8-like feel during the supernatural scenes, where the frames stutter and skip slightly like they're being played back on an old reel-to-reel, sort of blurring the lines somewhat as the demon pulled the family closer to his world.

This movie is really good.  I wish it was as good as Insidious, and while it doesn't go totally off the rails in the 3rd act like Insidious did it's not quite as good in the bits before that which keep it from hitting that level, but it is solid and very scary.

October Horror 2012: Creepshow

Creepshow is a classic 1982 horror film in the anthology style. The stories were written by Stephen King and everything was directed by George Romero. They use the Creepshow comic as a framing device and even use comic panels as transitions, it's pretty cute. None of this is particularly suspenseful, but you should expect spoilers.


The framing story is really simple, it's a kid gets caught reading the Creepshow comicbook which his father disapproves of. He throws it out "with the rest of the trash". As the page blows open, the panels animate and we see the title card for the first story.

Father's Day
The story starts in the parlor of mansion where an older woman, a young woman and her husband, and her faaaaabulous brother are waiting for Bedelia, the family matriarch, to arrive so they can celebrate father's day. They tell the story of her father, a miserable old bastard who emotionally abused her all her life. The rumor was that she had enough of it and bashed the old man's head in several years ago while he was demanding his father's day cake. She arrives in full-on Boss style: barreling down in a luxury car, smoking a huge cigar and swigging straight out of a bottle of Jim Beam. She checks in then goes to visit the gravestone. After spilling her whiskey, the zombiefied corpse of her father breaks through the surface and goes on a murder spree demanding cake. The short ends pretty quickly after this when the grandfather presents his "cake" to the young woman and her faaaabulous brother.

The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill
Starring Stephen King himself as Jordy, this story takes obvious inspiration from Lovecraft's "The Colour of Outer Space". A meteorite crashes in a dimwitted farmer's yard, and he decides he could sell it to the local college to pay off a bank loan he recently took out. He tries to cool it with water, which cracks it and makes it ooze a strange goo. He picks up the pieces and puts them in a bucket then goes inside to watch TV. Over the course of the night mysterious bright green alien vegetation grows at an alarming rate over anything that has touched the meteorite, or anything that has touched anything that's touched the vegetation or the meteorite. Jordy eventually becomes completely covered by the growth and pleads with God before shooting himself as the radio makes a highly ironic announcement. Stephen King is absolutely HILARIOUS as Jordy, and the whole short has these really comical dream sequences as Jordy imagines encounters with college professors and doctors (both played by the same person). It's one of the more fantastic bits, but it's short and really funny.

Something to Tide You Over
A horror short with Ted Danson and Leslie Nielsen? No way this can be scary! Ted Danson is in his swank bathrobe when Leslie appears and demands entrance to his apartment to talk. You see, Leslie plays Richard, the husband of the woman Ted's Harry is having an affair with. Richard plays as completely insane. He jokes, threatens, makes odd references, and generally has a great time while kidnapping Harry and driving him to the beach that he owns. I don't want to give away too much because I really enjoyed it.  Nielsen is amazing as the wealthy psychopath.  He's funny, charming, and absolutely nuts.

The Crate
This story is a bit odd.  One of the main characters is an utter bitch of a wife played by Adrienne Barbeau and her meek husband who constantly fantasizes about killing her.  The story starts at a party where she's really drunk and making an ass of herself while her husband tries to hide from her and speak with a friend of his from the local college.  The friend gets a call from the college from a janitor who found a box under a stairwell from an expedition over 180 years ago and leaves to check it out.  He and the janitor take the box to a lab and open it, at which point some weird beast attacks and eats the janitor.  The professor runs into the hallway to tell someone else and get help.  The person he finds doesn't believe him and then the thing eats him too.  He phones up the husband, and babbles the whole story to him.  The poor man decides this will be a great way to dispose of his wife and concocts a plan, that despite some minor glitches goes off quite well. At least until the *DUN DUN DUUNNNN*

They're Creeping Up On You!
This story is probably the most dull, but is also kindof disgusting. It's about a ruthless and wealthy businessman who lives in a hermetically sealed suite in a NYC high rise. During the story he deals with an increasingly numerous and impractical cockroach infestation. He fields business calls, and spends many of them threatening people and generally being a deplorable human being until the infestation is too much. At which point he retreats to a super-sealed panic room in a mad craze. He's overcome by an absurd amount of roaches before the end of the night and when the exterminator he's been yelling at people to get finally shows up, he can't answer.

The framing story wraps up with the comic book being picked up in the morning by the garbage man who flips through it and decides to read some of it, but is disappointed the voodoo doll has already been sent out for. Then it moves to the family where the father is at the table for breakfast, still mad at the son. Then he clutches at himself and screams in pain as we see the son, with the voodoo doll.

I'm concerned with my ability to keep write-ups of this length, but I'll try at least a few more times.
Tomorrow's movie is: Snoop Dogg's Hood of Horror

October Horror 2012: The Signal

The Signal is really pretty interesting.  It was written and directed by David Bruckner, Dan Bush, Jacob Gentry and released in 2007 for Sundance.  The movie is actually broken into three "chapters" of a continuing story, where each chapter is told from the perspective of a different character which brings about a radical shift in genre.  This does make a nice segue into Anthology week.


The basic setup is that Mya is having an affair and wakes up with Ben (her lover) to weird looking TV static.  They're so invested in each other they ignore it.  This is the Signal, an unexplained broadcast that turns normal people into violent psychopaths.  She returns home to her husband Lewis, who is jealous because he knows she's cheating.  Lewis and his friends are arguing about the TV static interfering with some sports game before Lewis snaps and beats one of his friends to death with a baseball bat.  Mya flees and hides overnight in a closet, listening to her CD player.  This seems to be her main defense against the Signal: she's constantly shutting everything out and listening to her walkman.  After she wakes up the first chapter begins.

Crazy In Love
The first chapter is a play on the slasher genre, complete with a hilariously gnarly looking weapon and an abductor who's immune to pain.  Mya escapes him by crashing her car and running away, passing the narrative to Clark, who was outside at the time and offered to help her.  This is amusing, and kindof tense.

The Jealousy Monster
The narrative passes briefly to Anna, who is setting up a New Year's Eve party despite having just murdered her husband in self-defense.  Clark comes over and tries to calm her and hides the body.  Shortly after, Lewis shows up, on the trail of Mya and the story takes a turn for the awkward as Lewis...and Clark...try to play party with Anna.  This is where characters start hallucinating a lot making it much harder to tell for sure what exactly is going on.  Does the Signal give people powers?  Does it make them nuts or does it just make them see everyone else as nuts?  This is probably the funniest bit, but it's really dark.  Lewis eventually snaps and tortures Anna to death before Clark reveals where Mya has gone.  Ben appears and knocks Lewis out, escaping with Clark and following Mya.

Escape From Terminus
After some brief flashbacks showing Ben's progression over the last 2 chapters, we shift to him and Clark convincing each other of their sanity and discussing the nature of the Signal.  Clark wraps his head in tin foil.  They arrive at the train station to discover Lewis has beaten them there and strapped Mya to a chair directly in front of the Signal.  This bit is the shortest part of the story so it's hard to discuss the overarching developments without giving away how the movie ends.

Suffice to say, it's suitably mind-bending after the hallucinations and questioning of the characters' sanity.

Overall the movie is brisk, darkly witty, and violent.  It's really satisfying to watch because it keeps hitting great beats and then quickly moving on to a different mood somehow managing to not seem schizophrenic.  The way the narrative follows the characters is very fun, and lends a certain amount of non-linearity keeps it from feeling too breakneck.  But it's kept in check so you never really lose where you are in the story.

It's a pretty great close to internet week.

Tomorrow the marathon moves on to Anthologies, starting with the 1982 classic: Creepshow.

I'm going to try to follow this format of giving brief synopsis of the framing story, followed by a quick overview of each short and then final impressions.

October Horror 2012: Kairo

Kairo (also known as Pulse) is a 2001 Japanese horror movie about a web cam site that promises visitors interactions with the dead.  It was remade in 2006 as the American film Pulse.


Kairo is possibly one of the most serious movies we've seen this year.  The movie is very slowly paced and almost 2 hours long.  There are a lot of lingering shots, and the color palette is really muted.  It feels like it was filmed in the 70s, using fashions and computers from the 90s.  It's also really creepy, if more than a bit confusing.  For most of the film the view switches between 2 unrelated stories of people being affected by what's going on, which seems to be a city being slowly depopulated via mass suicides that don't leave traces.  There's one thread that follows the staff at a greenhouse discovering the website after their techie friend commits suicide, and a 2nd one following a modern Luddite who spontaneously uncovers his keyboard and connects to the internet, stumbling upon the site for some reason I can't really remember.  It just sort of happened.

What's impressive is that the movie is almost entirely bereft of special effects, presenting its ghosts as mostly people in shadow in the corner and using clever editing to make ghosts vanish into black stains on walls.  It raises a lot of questions about if you're seeing the ghost, the person before fading away, or a hallucination of some sort as the character is initially unwilling to accept the death.  It's incredibly creepy without really using a single scare, shock, or death.

It does falter a little bit because the plot is really hard to follow, I don't know if that's a virtue of the plot itself or just my missing something in the subtitles.  I wouldn't mind a dub of this movie at all, I think it might help comprehension.

This is probably something that should be analyzed in much greater depth, but unfortunately I don't have a lot of time with the October marathon schedule.  I may revisit this later and probably do some comparisons of it with the remake Pulse, which I also enjoyed, but it's a very different kind of film.

Anyway, internet week comes to a close with The Signal.

October Horror 2012: Devour

Devour is a 2005 horror movie directed by David Winkler, who unfortunately bears no relation to Henry.  It stars Jensen Ackles and Dominique Swain, probably best known for Supernatural and Lolita, respectively.


The movie is about Jake Grey, a pretty upright seeming kid who's stuck in a small town filled with morally tanked and bored delinquents.  However, he's been plagued his whole life by ultra-real visions of torture, murder, and self-mutilation.  One night at a party his friends introduce him to an online game called "The Pathway".  When playing the game, players get phone calls from an unknown voice telling them to do specific acts ranging from sex, to vandalism, to violence, promising good fortune and power.

After some of his friends die while playing, Jake uncovers that "The Pathway" is a front for a devil worshipping cult that killed his mother.  The cult is using the game to try to find someone, probably him.

The movie itself has bits where it's maybe over-stylized, but overall it's pretty sharp.  The characters aren't terrible, but a bit flat and hammy.  The movie shines in its visuals and scenarios.  It's pretty imaginative in its setups, and the shooting and editing makes it all feel really fresh.  It's got a lot of good stuff that's disturbing and uncomfortable without going too far and becoming ridiculous.  The story isn't particularly impressive and I did zone out a bit towards the end, but for the most part I enjoyed it.  There's a lot in there about facing fear, or facing temptation or the devil, but it's mostly window dressing to support its style.  It's just deep and open ended enough to not be a complete wash but it has no illusions of grandeur.  It's good.

Internet week continues with: Kairo, the original inspiration for Pulse (which I mention briefly in the 2009 overview).