Tag: Occult Flick

The House of Seven Corpses

The House of Seven Corpses movie posterBy 1974, gothic horror films were falling out of fashion. The year saw the last gasps from the major franchises of Hammer Film Productions, with the releases of Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell and The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires. The genre had come a long way, but by the time this film, The House of the Seven Corpses, was released, seriously bloody slasher horror was making its presence felt. If a filmmaker was going to do gothic horror, it needed to have a twist.

Paul Harrison wrote (with Thomas J. Kelly) and directed The House of Seven Corpses. It stars John Ireland as filmmaker Eric Hartman. He has assembled a cast and crew to shoot a gothic horror flick at the old mansion of the Beal family (the mansion is played by the Utah Governor’s Mansion in Salt Lake City). And there’s the twist. It’s a gothic horror movie within a horror movie.

The Beals are all dead by the time Hartman begins shooting his movie, and they all died violently. There being no more Beals, the house is watched over by Edgar Price (John Carradine), a caretaker. Continue reading “The House of Seven Corpses”

The Ritual

A creepy cabin in some lonely woods. A small cast. A mysterious monster that stalks them. Most of us film fans have seen this movie many, many times. Such a broad outline has spawned hundreds of horror films over the years. Some are good, some are awful, and most are just mediocre. In that, these horror films are like every other film that features well-worn tropes. One can’t expect too much originality, which makes it all the better when something new is to be found. Continue reading “The Ritual”

They’re Watching

It just doesn’t feel like the October Horrorshow until the first review of a found footage flick has been posted. This year the honor goes to They’re Watching, the 2016 film from writing and directing duo Jay Lender and Micah Wright.

The film follows the crew of a home improvement reality show. They are going back to Moldova six months after the subject of an episode, Becky Westlake (Brigid Brannagh), bought and began to rehab a dilapidated house in the woods. The place looked like a total lost cause. It had been empty for decades. All the glass had been broken. Walls and floors had been exposed to wind, rain, freezing, thawing, vandalism, and everything else that causes an abandoned building to slowly fall apart. The best thing would have been to knock it down and start over. But, when the crew arrives on site, after a somewhat harrowing journey to the house, they find that Becky appears to have done a top-notch job. Continue reading “They’re Watching”

Suspiria

Suspiria movie posterA viewer would hard-pressed to find a more beautifully shot, atmospheric horror film than Dario Argento’s Suspiria. Argento’s, and cinematographer Luciano Tovoli’s, vivid production has become legend among horror fans, and for good reason. The film exists within a reality all its own, shifting back and forth between dreamlike and nightmarish, soft and menacing, as the situation requires. No study of horror films, and film in general, is complete without seeing this classic.

From 1977, Suspiria stars Jessica Harper as Suzy Bannion, a dance student who has been invited to study at the prestigious Tanz Dance Academy in Freiburg, Germany. Strange happenings begin immediately upon Suzy’s arrival at the academy (played on the exterior by a real location called The Whale House). She is greeted by a student who is fleeing into the night, and is herself turned away at the door, despite a driving, soaking rain.

Argento didn’t waste any time, packing this first sequence with some of the atmosphere that would come to define the movie. The Whale House is a gaudily painted relic, and the onscreen action is accompanied by an iconic soundtrack by an Italian band called Goblin. Goblin’s music is Mike Oldfield-esque, in that it’s evocative of the opening notes of Tubular Bells, which was used to effect in The Exorcist. Argento liked Goblin’s work for the film so much that he overuses it, pounding the same hook over and over again into the audience’s brains. Continue reading “Suspiria”

Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb, or, Underboob: The Movie

Blood from the Mummy's Tomb movie posterHammer, in a wise decision, jettisoned much of the tropes they had used in their previous Mummy films. For three consecutive productions, they had made basically the same film. British archaeologists discover ancient Egyptian tomb, said tomb has a curse on it, ancient Egyptian mummy resurrects and kills those who dared desecrate the tomb. It really was the same thing again and again. That was all well and good when they did it the first time, but by the last film, The Mummy’s Shroud, the plot was too familiar, and everyone involved seemed to be just going through the paces.

The fourth film, Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb, stays true to only some of the core elements, going so far as to ditch the traditional bandages and rags of films past. In this film, written by Christopher Wicking, loosely adapting Bram Stoker’s novel The Jewel of Seven Stars, the mummy is the perfectly preserved corpse of Queen Tera, who died young and buxom, and thus couldn’t be wrapped in bandages, oh no.

Her tomb is discovered by the requisite British Egyptologists, but they bring the dead queen and her artifacts back to England in secret, rather than placing them in a museum or putting on a tour. That’s because, for reasons that are never adequately explained, some of the party wish to resurrect the queen, so she can rule again. Anyway, the resurrection part is kind of on the periphery, because in the meantime, Queen Tera has a doppelganger in Margaret Fuchs (Valerie Leon, who plays both Margaret and Tera), the daughter of the archaeological expedition’s leader, Julian Fuchs (Andrew Keir). She was born in England at the very moment Queen Tera’s sarcophagus was opened, revealing the scantily clad beauty within. Continue reading “Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb, or, Underboob: The Movie”

Psychomania, aka The Death Wheelers

Tom Latham thinks that life could only get better if he just kills himself. Turns out, he’s right! Tom (Nicky Henson) isn’t suffering from depression, nor is he a deluded youth who is incapable of processing the permanence of death. He’s the leader of an outlaw biker gang called The Living Dead. They get their kicks by driving mildly quickly on the roads of rural England and occasionally tipping over vendor’s carts at the local shopping center. How dreadfully frightful. But Tom has an idea that can make his little band of nihilists even more of a public nuisance. Continue reading “Psychomania, aka The Death Wheelers”

Constantine, Rhymes with Tangerine

Back in 1993, DC Comics, under the direction of editor Karen Berger, took six of its mature readers titles and placed them under a new imprint — Vertigo. The Sandman, Swamp Thing, Doom Patrol (after a legendary run by writer Grant Morrison), Animal Man, Shade the Changing Man, and Hellblazer (featuring John Constantine, rhymes with clementine) were titles that had grown beyond the core superhero titles of DC’s lineup. Berger had been responsible for much of this, bringing aboard creative talent which would have been wasted penning yet another year-long superhero crossover designed to simplify DC’s bloated continuity, or spending day after day drawing just the right amount of ripples in Superman’s abs. Continue reading “Constantine, Rhymes with Tangerine”