In years past I’ve proposed 24 hour horror marathons on this site, as a method to just recommend a bunch of great horror films – but this year I’m not going to be quite as rigorous. Having just put myself through a 24 hour marathon earlier this year (Around the World in 24 Hours of Film), I’m a bit more respectful of the physical and psychological toll it can take. So here is a slightly more reasonable Halloween marathon you can attempt.
6am SCREAM OF FEAR (1961)
Jimmy Sangster wrote a number of Psycho and Diabolique inspired thrillers for Hammer in the 60’s, and one of the first is also the very best: Scream of Fear (aka Taste of Fear) places the lovely, sunglasses-clad Susan Strasberg in a wheelchair and terrorizes her for 90 minutes. Although her father is supposedly on vacation, she continues to encounter visions of his corpse in a country villa maintained by his too-pleasant wife. Is someone trying to drive her insane? The ending is still surprising, and, as a bonus, it doesn’t cheat the audience, as twists in this subgenre so often do. Also – Christopher Lee tries on a French accent.
7:30am THE LAST MAN ON EARTH (1964)
Vincent Price stars in this early adaptation of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. Originally slated to be a Hammer film – it’s a shame it wasn’t – this is nonetheless a respectable first stab at the novel, a stark horror film in which Price tries to discover a cure for a plague of the undead which has spread like wildfire across a near-future Earth. It’s one of his most cynical performances, quite different from the usual Price role, with some memorable images of chaos and decay in gritty black-and-white.
9am THE MONSTER SQUAD (1987)
Fred Dekker, director of Night of the Creeps (1986), first pitched his Ghostbusters-for-kids idea to Universal, which turned him down for unfathomable reasons. A group of youngsters try to thwart Dracula’s plans for world domination, which involve a motley group of classic monsters (Frankenstein’s monster, a werewolf, a mummy, and a gillman included). Along with Fright Night (1985), this is a movie for monster kids, refreshing amidst the 80’s onslaught of slasher films, but not without some 80’s teen-movie edge (such as some frank and funny sex talk). Co-written by Shane Black and featuring first-class special effects by the Stan Winston studio.
10:30am I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1943)
Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur provide this unsettling Gothic set amidst the zombie-worked plantations of Haiti – famously inspired by Jane Eyre. It’s horror at its most lyrical, but the atmosphere is indelible, too; you can almost feel the humidity as you follow the call of the voodoo drums.
12pm TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA (1970)
The most gleefully perverse of the Dracula sequels – newly available on Blu-Ray, too – Taste the Blood of Dracula wasn’t originally intended to feature Christopher Lee, since he was (once again) swearing off a return as the Count. When he was persuaded at the last minute, the character was shoehorned into a plot that was already working quite well without him. This means that the plot is actually more interesting than that of most paint-by-numbers Hammer Draculas, an exploration of upper-class corruption and youth rebellion, brilliantly cast. And, of course, Lee is quite good, too…if only they’d given him a better death scene.
1:45pm THE BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW (1971)
A teenage Linda Hayden makes a solid impression in Taste the Blood of Dracula, but leaves a more lasting mark in the downright disturbing The Blood on Satan’s Claw, in which she plays Angel Blake, a 17th century village girl who leads a gang of children into a Satanic storm of murder and rape. One of the best of the 70’s Satanic chillers, and the standout film of Hammer rival Tigon – it can still make a jaded viewer’s jaw drop.
3:30pm KURONEKO (1968)
Kaneto Shindô’s Kuroneko (Black Cat) follows two women, a woman and her stepmother raped and murdered by samurai, directly into the afterlife. As seductive ghosts, they lure fresh samurai into their home for a brutal slaughter. The bloody cycle seems to be broken when a man from their past uncovers their supernatural den: the girl’s husband, the mother’s son. But tragedy soon slashes through his life like a black cat’s claws. An eerie Japanese ghost story with a dream-like atmosphere from the director of Onibaba (1964), and available from the Criterion Collection.
5:15pm HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH (1982)
As the trick ‘r’ treaters start to arrive, it’s good to swing wide the front door and blast the screeching Silver Shamrock commercial jingle at them. That’s the most notorious aspect of this seasonal favorite – well, a favorite among those who don’t mind that Michael Myers is relegated to just a brief cameo. Director Tommy Lee Wallace keeps the John Carpenter vibe going, albeit in a film that feels more like Prince of Darkness (1987) than the original Halloween (1978). Still, this work of almost SF horror is a lot of fun.
7pm THE INNOCENTS (1961)
In this, the best adaptation of Henry James’ Turn of the Screw, Deborah Kerr accepts a position as a governess to two young children at the behest of their father, who prefers to live away in the city. The last person to hold the position died. “Do you have an imagination?” the father asks her ominously at the film’s start, and it’s her imagination which is the true antagonist of The Innocents, filling the shadows with the dreadful stories the maid tells her, and leaping to conclusions about unspeakable acts and ghostly possession. We can’t believe everything we see in this ghost story directed by Jack Clayton and co-written by Truman Capote, but what we do witness, from Kerr’s trembling vantage, is unnerving.
8:45pm SUSPIRIA (1977)
The pinnacle of Dario Argento’s career is this nerve-rattling supernatural thriller about a coven of witches hidden deep inside a dance school. Jessica Harper has the lead, her eyes as wide and expressive as a silent film star, perfect for Argento’s super-stylized environments visualized in reds and blues. Similarly, the soundtrack by prog rock band Goblin is almost more important than the dialogue. This bloody fairy tale is a film to envelop you, and slowly squeeze the life out of you.
10:30pm AT MIDNIGHT I’LL TAKE YOUR SOUL (1964)
José Mojica Marins is the writer, director, and star of the first in his “Coffin Joe” series of films (the most recent entry, after a long break, arrived in 2008). When I saw this at a revival as part of the Sundance Film Festival in the early 2000’s, Marins introduced the film with his long, curving, unclipped fingernails waving in the air, promising to take our soul at the midnight hour. And so I’ll close this marathon with a similar invocation to dark forces. Marins did shock on a budget, exposing his victims to real tarantulas and other horrors in surrealistic sets that seem to be Jean Cocteau by way of Charles Addams. It’s the first Brazilian horror film, but, thanks to Coffin Joe, was not the last.
