The End.

Well. I did it. I watched 31 (or maybe a couple more than that) horror movies during October. I didn't quite get to watch one every day, but watching so many definitely had its effect on me... restless nights, dreams of being chased, and falling asleep because I could've sworn a movie had the same plot as the one I'd seen two days before. In any case, I'm glad I did it. I don't think I'll watch another horror movie until next October, but that's okay, it was lots of fun while it lasted.

I didn't get a chance to post about the last batch of movies I watched this weekend, so here they are.


Twenty-six: Piranha


Piranha reminded me quite strongly of the 1975 classic Jaws, except with an origin story. As you might be able to guess, piranhas are our monsters here, except their in a river in the United States after being let loose from a government testing facility. We never really see the piranhas up close... when they attack, we just get shots of rubber fish moving back and forth quickly next to kicking legs with red blood floating to the surface and the most annoying sound, which must be the sound piranhas make when feeding?? It's much more convincing than I made it sound, and these quick glimpses underwater, along with the tension built by needing to reach the next area downriver before an attack occurs, add to the thrill of this movie. I enjoyed it, even though it did feel like a bit of a rip off of Jaws, made only three years earlier.


Twenty-seven: Eraserhead

I'm not really sure what to say about Eraserhead. As writer/director David Lynch's first feature-length film, it has all the bizarreness you'd expect from him, with a kind of raw student-film quality that lends itself very well to the overall feel. It's indisputably one of the best horror movies of all time and just an all around crazy film. I'll try to summarize for those who don't know anything about it, but I think I'll need to watch a dozen more times to even know how to begin to describe everything in it. Henry Spencer lives in an industrial environment in an apartment that looks abandoned. His girlfriend leaves him with their mutant baby, he has weird encounters with his beautiful neighbor, and his only entertainment is the lady in the radiator who sings to him. This very bleak look into Henry's life kinda made me go crazy. There is very little dialogue, only the constant screaming of that weird looking baby. Very bizarre, and yet I want to watch it again...


Twenty-eight: Repulsion

Roman Polanski's 1965 movie Repulsion follows Carol as she descends into madness. We are never given a reason, though there are plenty of hints and nuances leaving us guessing as to why she has become seemingly schizophrenic. A terrifying thriller that started out quite normally and just spiraled more and more out of control to a gripping conclusion. Truly scary, in a kind of Psycho way.





Twenty-nine: Hellraiser

I was kind of apprehensive that Hellraiser would be a typical horror film with the monster hiding behind the door, but it's far from it. It gives us a glimpse into the world from which the movie's villain has come from, how he got there, and there is more than one monster. The imagination of Clive Barker has got to be pretty messed up to come up with this movie and the characters in it.


Thirty: Tale of Two Sisters

FYI: Make sure you pay attention during this movie. I got a little bored during the beginning and got distracted with something else, and then I had to look up the plot summary on IMDB. There's a lot of crazy in this movie. And you don't really find out who is the crazy one and just how crazy they really are until the very end. The movie begins with a girl in a hospital being questioned by her doctor about her family and the day that led her to being taken into the hospital. The rest of the movie is a flashback of what the girl remembers, and then the camera slowly reveals to us what actually happened. The family must cope with the deaths of those close to them, at least one character is hallucinating several things, and there's some pretty serious parental abuse. Thank you, South Korea, for yet another hauntingly creepy film.


Thirty-one: Halloween

If you haven't seen Halloween, then you've probably been living under the same rock as me. Hi, neighbor! If there's one thing I've learned this month, it's that I'm not a fan of slasher films. They don't particularly scare me, the make me upset at the characters, and they generally don't interest me because the slasher him/herself is usually not that interesting. I though the scariest part of this movie was in the first few minutes, when Michael Myers is shown as a child in his clown costume holding a bloody knife, just after his first kill. That image will haunt me much more than the image of him later in life when he's chasing down poor Jamie Lee Curtis. But, just because I say I didn't really like it, doesn't mean it's not a good movie. It's just not my cup of tea. And, just because I say it wasn't as scary as others I've watched, doesn't mean it won't give me nightmares tonight. I'm almost positive it will.



There you have it. Thirty-one horror movies in one month. When I decided to do this, I knew I'd be scared, but I didn't really expect to be sleepless for so many nights. Let's hope none it hasn't done any real, permanent damage, and I can safely say that I'm really excited to watch a happy, feel-good movie tomorrow night. Happy Halloween!