Twelve Weird Things November!!!

 I enjoyed doing 31 Days of Horror in October, it forced me to get out of the creative writing rut I've been in for quite some time now. I'm also opening up my post topics more to thinking about things unrelated to griping on my gaming group proclivities; oddly enough I think that has settled down into a routine, and it looks like it will be a sort of regular vacillation between Pathfinder, Tales of the Valiant, Starfinder, Mothership and Call of Cthulhu for the time being. Other players who want to GM can introduce their preferred games into the mix....those are mine. 

But this post is not about perpetuating on such endless musings! It is instead about setting a new goal for November to keep my writing habits up. Now, doing a daily post for 31 days straight was actually a great way to kick into gear but that is just not a realistic goal for me, as I am neck deep in very involved work so such a pace is too stressful at the moment. But the creative exercise is good for the soul, so I am not interested in slacking, either. I will instead commit to Twelve Days of Posting, and the theme shall be: Weird Things! Yes, weird things is a broad and interpretive topic, but that is the point. Thematically I will pick things that are weird, be they games, movies, books, game content or topics, and then run with them. Twelve posts would be approximately three a week, but could be more, could be less in any given week....but we will absolutely have 12 posts by the time the 30th of November hits.

Okay! So this post kicks it off, but I'll defer to the next post for the First Weird Thing.....

The 31st Day of Horror: Spring (2014)

 

Spring (2014)

For the final 31 Days of Horror challenge I am pleased to see that the final stretch is populated heavily with cosmic horror films of different fine calibers. Spring, a movie that apparently came out 11 years ago and I only just now watched, is often described as in the cosmic horror/Lovecraftian vein, but I rather disagree; it fits a niche more in line with mythology and even creeps into the realm of allegory just a little. Spring is only partially a horror film, and takes themes of transformation, immortality and tradition that might exist in a decidedly different context in another story and treats them in unique and new ways.

The story premise is simple: Evan is a cook at a bar who has been taking care of his terminally ill mother. After she passes away he gets into a brawl at the bar and soon decides maybe he needs to get out of California entirely, and takes a trip to Italy on a lark, the place he wanted to go with his father before he passed as away as well. With so much loss in his life, he needs an escape, and Italy provides it.

First Evan runs into a couple Englishmen who he tags along with, then while visiting a remote seaside town he meets Louise, a young local woman who he rather quickly becomes obsessed with; she for some reason just wants a one night stand, but he wants a real relationship. She blows him off, but Evan is persistent and decides to stay in the town, working for an old gentleman offering lodging in exchange for farm work. Evan then manages to bump in to her the next day and convinces her to give him a chance on a date. They hit it off well, and it quickly builds up a week long whirlwind relationship.

The problem is that Louise seems to have a secret. She has two different color eyes, though she tries to disguise it with contacts. She works on a research program for a University to study the genetics of the local population, which has changed very little over the centuries. She takes special shots for an unusual skin condition she manifests. Occasionally, she transforms into a horrifying monster and murders things.

Evan's and Louise's relationship is the core of the film, but her complication as a unique, ancient immortal Roman with a monstrous variation of lycanthropy that you really have to see to appreciate makes for a fascinating character study laced with a unique form of horror mixed with, at its core, a deep and impermeable love story about two very complicated and extremely sympathetic people.

This was a fascinating, thoughtful and even philosophical movie, and honestly almost more of a love story than a monster flick, though it is absolutely both. If you are like me and missed this gem for the last decade, definitely check it out. Yet another A+! Deeply interesting, and it honestly goes in directions I don't think any other film has quite managed to do so well. 

SPOILER SECTION

This movie is so much better than it lets on, a deep dive into a world that is more than the sum of its parts. It's a love story, and its markedly allegorical in how it spins a story of two young lovers who just happen to have this extra hurdle, specifically her monstrous nature, and her inevitable reincarnation which leaves her both herself, in her consciousness, but an entirely new person as well. An an allegory this could be symbolic of any relationship in which one partner has a deep, dark secret, obligation, addiction or other obstacle to properly embracing the relationship or building trust. By veiling this practical issue in building a relationship in a literal monstrous allegory it allows for a fun exploration of what it means to fall in love and build trust.

Layered on top of this fine allegory is a surprisingly deep conceptual space about what is literally happening in the film: an immortal, ancient woman who is genetically anomalous, bordering on magic, with a condition that could be the actual explanation for so many mythological creatures of the archaic world. Her awareness of her condition and her attempts in the modern age to study and understand her own genetics and treat it to give herself a better life, even as she tries to fall back on old occult paths as a last resort, makes her a remarkably sympathetic character, no matter how many animals and tourists she eats along the way. Her decision at the end (and we assume the best ending here, which is what seems to be implied), is that like her mother in Pompeii she can choose to fall in love, and the chemical influence of oxytocin causes the "birth" of her new self to stall, leading to her existing self continuing, but now as a mortal woman. But the subtly stated implication is, just as with her mother, that her children will be born with her genetic monstrousness, so the cycle still continues. 

As a stand alone film Spring is great, well worth a watch. But as a concept space where I want to learn more about Louise and her kind, for surely there must be others such as her who have perhaps disappeared over time? Throwbacks to a wild sort of mutation that founded the belief in everything from Lilith to the gorgons, lamias to chimeras, you name it....the implied universe of Spring is deeply fascinating to think about. Given Hollywood's track record for pile-driving expanded universes into the ground I'll just say that Spring, by itself, is more than enough to let me imagine what this universe is like.

The 30th Day of Horror: Liminal Horror Investigators

 

Liminal Horror Investigators (Goblin Archives)

You know what I haven't reviewed yet? An actual paper-and-pencil RPG! Lots of movies, several books and graphic novels, a few video games....but no RPG. Well, let's fix that with Liminal Horror. Published in the indie scene by Goblin Archives, the current edition is called Liminal Horror Investigators, which is a slightly buffed up version of the original Liminal Horror book. Being indie zine RPGs, these are slim tomes, but don't worry....a recent crowdfunding campaign which I backed is for a thick and heavy hardcover Deluxe Edition, so as with all good and simple RPGs, that will inevitably change. It's like the carcinization effect on beaches, except in the RPG book world, all slim and to-the-point RPGs inevitable morph over time into immense, weighty hardcover tomes.

Liminal Horror uses the game engine introduce in "Into the Odd," which is a very simple mechanical system involving only three stats: Strength, Dexterity and Control. You have a hit score, "HP" for Hit Protection, which is effectively your "combat competence timer to death" meter.....the game system's combat mechanic is unique in that during combat, an attack simply rolls damage and applies it to the target's armor and then HP score. Hit Protection is really measure of how tough and competent you are in a fight, and when it hits zero your luck has run out and damage is now critical, going against your stats. This leads to the Wounds table, where bad things happen, or the Fallout table which is what happens when you take mental damage against your Control score. In Liminal Horror Fallout can be customized to the module, and it can mean anything from mental effects such as paranoia to bizarre supernatural curses and manifestations. The sample tables provided provide some great concept spaces for a game.

Most of the game's character generation process boils down to rolling for a profession, appearance personality traits, gear, and some bonds and features to link the party together. The remainder of this 44 page book is a couple pages of rules (it's a very simple game) and cool stuff for a "facilitator" to use -- the game's name for the GM. This includes rules on artifacts, a small bestiary, different styles of adventure design (voidcrawls, mysteries, funnel rules and flashbacks all get some attention). There's no magic system as such; magic may manifest as a side effect of fallout, resonant artifacts, or whatever the GM (facilitator) might throw in the investigator's way.

Overall Liminal Horror is a very nice, slim pick-up-and-play zine RPG and well worth a look if you like portable games that can get a group up and running in no time. It has a number of modules available from different supporting publishers, of which The Bureau and The Mall are two of the most noteworthy, though I am especially fond of The Parthogenesis of Hungry Hollow. The style of horror in the game and its modules is reflective more of modern horror themes common online and in video games. Imagine Silent Hill, The Backrooms, Creepy Pastas, Slenderman, Sirenhead and such and you will get an idea of what is thematically in sync with what Liminal Horror supports....but even in the bae book there are some curiously Innsmouthian influences hidden in there so mythos horror is also in the mix. Note also that there is a module featuring these frog men in the first Liminal Horror book that is missing from the Investigators edition, so still a reason to hold on to that tome if you find an original. Mechanically this newer version just adds more rules options and ideas, but leaves that module out. I am interested to see how they fill up a couple hundred pages with the Deluxe Edition.

For useful resources on Liminal Horror click here!

 

The 29th Day of Horror: Suitable Flesh (2023)

 

Suitable Flesh (2023)

Some movies fall under the category of cosmic horror, and they may or may not draw direct inspiration from Lovecraft and the many, many successors in this genre. Other films are distinctly Lovecraftian, either referencing elements of Lovecraft's mythology (Arkham, Cthulhu, etc.) or adapting his actual stories. There's also a third category of films as I see it: movies based on Lovecraft's reinterpretation through the lens of Stuart Gordon's style of Lovecraft movies. I think Suitable Flesh fits this last category. This last category isn't just characterized by a style emulating Stuart Gordon's direction or screen writing, but also the notion that there's a strong psycho-sexual undercurrent in the mythos of Lovecraft, something that may have been there on an unconscious level for Lovecraft himself, not out of sorts for his time, when psychiatry in the nascent age of Freud and Jung. Also, Gordon's penchant for copious levels of gore. Director Joe Lynch is channeling all of this in spades in Suitable Flesh, which is loosely based on The Thing on the Doorstep (super super loosely), and to prove my point further is even dedicated to Stuart Gordon.

Dr. Elizabeth Derby meets the wrong kind of patient, but perhaps it was inevitable given she maintains a practice in Arkham, Massachusetts. Asa Waite is a young man who claims to be periodically possessed by his father, Ephram. At first she thinks she just wants to help him, but really she's abnormally, sexually intrigued by Asa and what she thinks is just a schizophrenic episode. Asa, however, contends that his father is literally possessing him. After meeting Ephram, Elizabeth has lots of clues in front of her she does not recognize with her clinical nonbeliever mind (including what one can only assume is the Necronomicon on his desk). A short time later an emergency happens, Asa begging for her to help, and she stumbles on a scene in which Ephram appears to be having a heart attack and Asa wants to finish him off. Things go sharply awry as Asa is possessed, then they have sex, then she discovers that in having sex he possesses her, and then in short order Ephram with Asa's mind awakens and possessed Asa cuts his head off. Then the house catches fire. 

Like, that's all in the first act!

Anyway, it continues from here and escalates....quite rapidly.....as Ephram, now in Asa's body, reveals he very much wants to take possession of Elizabeth now. He can do so over the phone, with the right spell, fairly easily, while leaving his own body as Asa chained up on a basement somewhere so she can't escape once she's swapped bodies with him. This leads to an interesting undercurrent of sexual violation as the mind of Ephram has his way with Elizabeth's body while she is dispossessed. Oh yeah, and there's an altar to what I would assume is Azathoth or something in the basement. Weee!

This movie was a trip. Watch it with people who don't mind lots of sex (though, to contrast, it is slightly tamer sex than in, for example, the recent movie Honey Don't), and the sex does play heavily into the story. There is also Elizabeth's friend who works at Arkham Asylum, Dr. Upton, who is the straight-laced friend who wants to help but can't quite put the clues together (and also in the original story the actual narrator).

This movie was frickin' wild, a total trip. The one takeaway you should get out of this movie is that weird shit goes down all the time in Arkham, Mass. and the profession of psychiatrist is probably fraught with existential danger in that lovely town. Well worth a watch, even if you aren't in to Lovecraftian stuff! A solid A!

Spoiler! Best moment: the scene where Elizabeth tries to kill Asa by backing into him with the car,  and the lovely use of the car rear-cam during the scene. Second best moment: that poor security guard!

The 28th Day of Horror: The Breach (2022)

The Breach (2022)

John Hawkins is the Sherriff of the lakeside town of Lone Crow investigating a body in a boat that washed ashore in his district. The body is a mess, and Hawkins quickly brings in coroner Jacob Redgrave, while  his reliable officer Parks starts researching to find evidence of missing persons. The coroner quickly identifies the body is effectively shredded and missing all of its bones. Parks finds out the clothing and ID of a missing man, a physicist named Cole Parsons who apparently came to the area and hired a guide to take himself and his crates of equipment upriver to a remote house only accessible by boat. The person who took him is Meg, an ex girlfriend of both the sheriff and the coroner.

Hawkins decides a trip upriver to investigate the house Parsons was staying at may shed light on his grisly death. He brings Redgrave along, and Meg knows where to go so they take her and her boat. On the way out they hear strange, ominous noises that seem to come from everywhere all at once. Not long after they arrive at the house, but something is off. Meg realizes the house looks different aged far beyond one year since she last was there. Inside, the decrepit mansion has more weirdness. A mysterious surging generator, a strange room filled with arcane trappings, and then Linda, Parson's estranged wife shows up....she's been looking for Parsons ever since an event where their daughter disappeared.

The story rapidly escalates with one new twist after another. As with so many other well done movies I hesitate to say any more; this is best watched for effect. I will say this much, though: I bought the movie on a lark because it was listed as in the cosmic horror genre, and that is 100% on target. Indeed, while it does not attempt to replicate any specific Lovecraft or mythos tale, it does have a nontrivial amount of From Beyond in it's DNA.....there's a definite sense that Edward Tillinghast's machinations were a bit of inspiration for the story here, though the actual nature and execution in The Breach is most definitely its own unique take. 

A couple observations that are maybe teeny tiny spoilers: First, particle physics and occult black magic are probably best not mixed together. Second, I notice the Rotten Tomatoes score is fairly high, but the popcorn meter (which I think is the audience score) is really low. Do not be dissuaded; I suspect the low rating is because this movie does not end on a positive note; quite the opposite, it ends like all cosmic horror tales should, utterly devoid of any sort of happy ending for our poor protagonists.

Anyway, the soundtrack as always helps make the movie, and this one is no exception. The gory FX are almost all practical, and the third act of this movie is utterly bonkers, as it should be. Solid B for me! I liked it enough that while I do have it on Vudu, I may see if I can hunt around for a proper Blu-ray for the collection.

The 27th Day of Horror: Ash (2025)

 

Ash (2025)

I got to watch this movie on its limited theatrical release, making me very glad I decided to go see a random movie on a lark on the one weekend it was out in theaters. Ash was released by Shudder, which if you don't know about them, Shudder is a fantastic horror-focused curated streaming service. In fact, these days I only subscribe to four streaming services, and Shudder is one of them. The other three are Curiosity Stream, Magellan TV and Hulu, thought the last one is technically free as part of my phone deal. Shudder however is the best, especially if your tastes run in a "weird and horror" vein for films. 

The setup for Ash is immediately intriguing as a woman named Miya awakens with a concussion and memory loss on a research station on an alien world. She finds the rest of the crew dead, brutally murdered, and outside an alien landscape. She quickly figures out that the atmosphere, while somewhat breathable is actually mildly toxic and she flees back into the ship after witnessing a bizarre "mirroring" image of herself in the hazy distance. Soon, as she begins to have flashbacks of her memory of the living crew on the ship, a second crewman who was on the orbiting ship named Brion arrives in response, apparently, to a distress call.

As the mystery of what happens unfolds, Riya begins to remember the events, and image sof herself killing her fellow crewmates. Evidence is uncovered of an alien artifact, a tunnel network that the crew was exploring, and an unexpected death while doing so. Brion meanwhile remains focused on the next window of opportunity for the lander to break orbit and return to the ship. As daylight falls, a hull breach diverts their attention from the mystery for a moment, though the actual breach appears to have been sabotage, suggesting a third person is still alive....and there is a missing body, or so it seems...

Ash does an amazing job of building paranoid tension and as escalating mystery with only two actors, accomplishing a vibe not unlike The Thing in terms of the "Who's really causing these problems?" kind of sense. By the third act it goes completely off the rails....and I will absolutely not spoil it, but take note that all of those amazing creature effects at the end are practical effects, a real spectacle when the "truth" is finally revealed. 

Much of this film has an eerie, dreamlike quality. There are a lot of impressive establishing shots for the planet's environs, and some eerie dream sequences. Some of the graphics feel like they might be using some AI elements, but the mix with practical effects works very well. The soundtrack is also incredible, deeply unnerving and mood setting.

If you are a fan of horror in general, scifi horror in particular, or want some inspiration for your next Mothership campaign, this movie is well worth a watch! It is another one of my guilty pleasure faves, but is also a genuinely good film. About the worst thing I can say about it is: why don't they have, like, better surgical machines, or even anesthetic in the distant future? You'll know what I mean when you see it! Anyway...solid A, totally worth a watch. 

The 26th Day of Horror: Psycho Girls (1985)

 

Psycho Girls (1985)

It was a while before I decided to pick this movie up from the Vinegar Syndrome collection, but I think I'm glad I did. It's a weird, punk, low budget psychotic movie that is exemplary of its period in time; this kind of movie could only exist in the unique conflux of attitudes and ideas in the seventies and eighties, with twisted and weird takes on sanity and psychotherapy. Watching the extras on the making of this movie was possibly more interesting than the movie itself, but the movie did manage to deliver on its incredibly nutty low-budget "horror comedy" vibe. Also, its a canuxploitation film, another are gem from Canada. 

Directed by Jerry Ciccoritti, who has a great interview on the making of this film worth watching, did it in his early punk days on zero budget with some film they had available, in abandoned properties they had access to. It's a great story. The movie itself is a mix of wannabe actors and friends of the director, none of them especially "good" but all of them doing a fine job of hamming it up for the camera.

The plot is about two sisters, one of whom (Sarah) kills her parents one day with rat poison and ends up committed for the next twenty years...or so it seems. The other sister Victoria lives her life and seeks to make sure her sister never leaves the asylum. One day, her sister kills an orderly and escapes. First her psychiatrist (the amusingly named Doctor Hippocampus) ends up murdered and skinned, then she seeks out Victoria, and the two of them have a confrontation from which Sarah walks away the lone survivor, Sarah then travels to the house of a writer and his wife where Victoria had been a housekeeper and offers her services as cook while her sister is "away." They accept, and that night at the dinner party things go very, very south.

Sarah, it turns out, escaped the asylum with a gang of fellow inmates, who conspire with her to drug the guests of the evening party after feeding them her sister, literally. They then tie up and proceed to inventively murder the guests one by one in the depths of the now shut down asylum (the timing on her escape vs. shut down of the asylum is a bit wiggly here). It is up to our writer, who has been a quasi-film-noir narrator the entire time, to figure out how to escape before he and his wife are the final victims of the evening.

The "villains" of this movie are caricatures more than anything, suitable as Batman villains more than they would be a representation of real madness. The movie does a surprisingly good job of introducing our main characters (the husband and wife) and their later guests during a lengthy dinner conversation, enough so that their deaths have a bit more impact later on. There's a lot of "80's level" talk about psychiatry and therapy in this movie, and the villains are  to some level supposed to be reflective of this underlying theme. It is quintessentially 80's in this regard, maybe even a throwback to the 70's, with what can only be described as a contentious and very, very dated take on the entire topic of mental health and psychiatry, through the lens of some aspiring early guerilla punk filmmakers.

There is one amusing plot hole, not obvious but I do love it: midway in, the psychos order some pizza for delivery deep in the asylum while torturing their "guests." The pizza guy eventually shows up and almost walks in on the entire affair before dropping the pizza off and fleeing. The entire scene is amusing, if only because its so out of left field, and shines a light on the later sequence in the film when our two protagonists finally escape and then get lost in the endless halls of the impossible to navigate asylum....apparently only the pizza guy knew exactly where the entrance and exit was!

One might also wonder about the name Psycho Girls, because strictly speaking only Sarah is here to do the evil deeds (her gang of psychos are all men). According to the director its the two sisters....but alas, we really didn't get to see Victoria shine. I was sort of hoping for a surprise twist at the end (and there is one, a bit) in which Victoria is revealed not to have been dinner but rather it was the psychiatrist, and she returns to end her sister....but nope, the twist went in a slightly different direction.

Some of this movie, including the extended dinner talk scene and certain other moments (the pizza guy, the confrontation between the sisters, even the entire "dinner party turned massacre night" them) reminded me oddly of Quentin Tarantino's films. I wonder if Tarantino saw this, given how much he was influenced by cinema from this period and earlier.  

So, this is a movie worth watching if you like this period of cinema and enjoy experimental low-budget weirdness from early aspiring directors. It's also worth a watch if you just like creepy and off-putting horror films. For me, it definitely was worth seeing though I do rank it at a solid C.

The 25th Day of Horror: The Resurrected (1991)

 

The Resurrected (1991)

Apparently Stuart Gordon's success at adapting H.P. Lovecraft stories to film led to Dan O'Bannon taking a shot at it. Yes...the man behind Return of the Living Dead and a whole lot of Alien did, in fact, take a shot at Lovecraft with The Resurrected, loosely adapted from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. I had picked this up recently from Vinegar Syndrome, and was all excited to enjoy what I thought was an unknown film to me. Right around the point where the stalwart team of investigators find themselves in the depths of Charles Ward's secret laboratory (which he inherited from Arthur Curwen), the really cool reanimated monster shows up and I was instantly, "Wait, I have seen this movie before. Twice."

So with this sudden realization, the question must be posed: is this actually a good movie if I had completely forgotten about it, twice? Well, assuming the issue is not the high quality 4K UHD copy I watched confusing me into not being a  grainy SD release as I think it was the last two times I saw it, the real answer is: it's actually pretty good, but its also rather slow for the first 75% of the movie, in a manner which, while shockingly appropriate in is methodical pace for your average Call of Cthulhu game, and definitely in alignment with some of the source material, is nonetheless just not exciting enough to be very memorable. This holds true right up until you get to the point where the investigators (for they are the embodiment of your average CoC team) decide to go to the source of the evil, with explosives, though they cannot resist exploring to see what it is they need to blow up first. This leads to some truly inspired rubber monster special effects that are well worth seeing. 

The plot is straight-forward: John March is a private investigator in Providence who is approached by Claire Ward, the worried wife of Charles Dexter Ward, who has been acting very strange lately. He's holed up on the old family property with a strange Asian guy, doing something  that has her very worried. March takes the case, and proceeds to handle it in a remarkably staid and proper manner, with his allies doing research for him while he checks out what's going on. For much of the film this feels like a mellow police procedural, in which occasionally weird murders happen. When there are moments of weird gore its a reminder that there is, in fact, a horror story going on and not just a case of a strange husband shacking up with other strange men in a colonial house. 

March eventually deduces that Ward's got some serious problems, with a lot of corpse theft and possibly a connection to murders in the area that look like wild animal attacks but may, in fact, be cannibalism. As the story deepens, more of Ward's true story and his obsession with his ancestors and their alchemical desire for immortality are revealed, until it all culminates in an explosive finale that reminded me of half the Call of Cthulhu games I've participated in over the decades. 

The Resurrected was doomed not to compete with Stuart Gordon's films due to its almost painstaking effort to follow the pace of a slow, methodical investigative procedural, but when it does go off the rails it does so quite well. It really could have used a few more scenes early on that helped set the stage for the odd murders, for example, but I suppose there was only so much mileage to be had with the grotesque resurrected dead at the end, and introducing them earlier would have used up their impact too soon. 

Overall, for fans of Lovecraft's appearances on film, this is worth a watch. If you like supernatural horror procedurals, you will find something to like. The soundtrack to this movie is great, though typical of the nineties with its orchestration, and a general fan of horror will enjoy the events at the end of the movie for sure. I would rank this a deserving C+ and I look forward to forgetting I saw it all over again in a few years. 

The 24th Day of Horror: Alien from the Abyss (1989)

 

Alien From The Abyss (1989)

Easily set in the category of  "entertainingly bad" and also a movie from when I was still a teenager, I am simultaneously shocked I had never seen it before, and also not shocked at all because my love of really bad vintage films is a more recent thing for me; I generally didn't like wasting my time on garbage like this when I was in my late teens and twenties (ah, the irony). I mean....the first time I saw Tetsuo The Iron Man in my twenties on VHS I thought it was garbage; now I have that director's entire filmography on my shelf. The more things change.....!

Alien From The Abyss is another low budget "filmed somewhere in the Philippines where SAG-AFTRA can't find them" type of films, directed by Italian hack/auteur Antonio Margheriti (I mean that in the best possible way), Alien from the Abyss is a lovely case of how to make a big budget concept come to life on a shoestring budget, and it actually does an entertaining (if not good) job of it. The story revolves around a reporter and her cameraman, who sneak on to a remote island with an active volcano to find evidence of corporate malfeasance. Specifically, the corporation is disposing of nuclear and toxic waste by dumping it into a volcano. 

A tangent! The volcano is a lovely set piece. They have a miniature, filmed from one very specific angle, and any time they want to show the volcano they have someone pick up a pair of binoculars to look at it....always from that same angle, no matter where they are on the island. 

So our lead character and her cameraman quickly get into trouble as private goons try to catch them, and meanwhile we have a mad scientist and the corporate bad guy up to no good, then there's a secondary protagonist introduced in the form of a skeevy snake harvester on the island, and somewhere around the halfway point in the movie something happens, and the eponymous Alien from the Abyss awakens in a lake, melting and clawing everything in its path. We also have lots of miniature shots establishing various facilities to be destroyed later, in some glorious miniature set pieces that any fan of Godzilla movies will admire.

The creature is, for most of its run primarily just a long black claw that snakes around causing all sorts of problems. The mad scientist (hammed up by the actor, making for one of the more memorable characters in this movie) has a way of injuring it, but he's ultimately just a delivery mechanism for the protagonists to nab the weapon when he gets mildly bumped and dies. The last sequence in the film grants us full view of the immense alien, which stands twenty or so feet tall and is held up by a crane, a sort of floppy kaiju sized mannequin. Even despite this, the special effect is surprisingly good for the kind of movie this is; it's well worth a watch for this effect alone.

Alien from the Abyss is a bit of a mess, as most movies of this caliber are, but its got plenty of memorable moments and set pieces, and the actors really do give it their all. I watched the Severin Films UHD release of the restored version and have to say it was worth my time. As with all such films, it rests in the category of a solid B! If you are ranking it against actually good movies I'd probably call it a D+, though. But if you want to watch something you might have stumbled across on Saturday late night TV at midnight? B for sure.

The 23rd Day of Horror: Malignant (2021)

 

Malignant (2021)

Released in the general era of the Pandemic, Malignant is one of several films that got pushed out there either for a limited theatrical release or were moved to streaming, and like so many of those movies I don't think too many got widely circulated. Malignant in particular feels like an interesting throwback: it's an old school horror film in the sense that its a balls-to-the-wall 80's style supernatural slasher film that also manages to grab some of the modern horror film energy. I had read somewhere that the director James Wan really wanted to make a gonzo throwback horror film....and I have to say, he totally did it. 

Malignant opens up on a suitably spooky sanitarium somewhere on the pacific coast, one of those immense and impossibly malevolent looking facilities practically ready to fall into the ocean. Something bad is going on here, and a patient who appears to have bizarre supernatural powers is subdued, though we never get a good look at them. Cut to years later, and we meet Madison, a woman who lives in her own form of impossibly large house is having problems with her lousy boyfriend who injured her in a fight. Not long after, she begins to experience horrific visions in which she witnesses a killer's actions while finding herself paralyzed. She seeks answers, even as the real murders begin to pile up. Can she aid the police before the killer finds her?

I'll stop here. I loved this movie. It's another one of those guilty pleasure movies I mentioned. I think I'd rank it a solid B+ but deep down inside I think this one is so close to an A that I award the B only grudgingly. If you like gonzo throwback horror with weird supernatural twists, check it out!

Okay then....

SPOILER ALERT

Yeah so Madison is not seeing through the eyes of the killer. Well, not exactly. She IS the killer! Or more accurately, her insanely evil, suppressed vestigial twin which primarily exists as a secondary face that was hidden by very effective cosmetic surgery on the back of her head. Her twin is awakened after her head injury, snapped back into awareness, and it slowly begins to take possession of Madison, subsuming her control in the fugue states she experiences. Because the twin is on her "back" it moves backwards....I believe they got a noted contortionist to do a lot of these scenes, because they are quite wild. There's an entire sequence in the police precinct that is ridiculously over the top, and if you are prone to watching spoilerific content online you have probably seen clips of it. Believe me....just watch the whole film, it is 100% a complete psycho trip and I loved every minute of it. 

The 22nd Day of Horror: Little Nightmares Enhanced Edition (Switch 2)

 

Little Nightmares Enhanced Edition (Switch 2)

Besides finding suitably horror-themed games (and movies, and books, and graphic novels, etc.) to play for my 31 Day of Horror challenge, I've actually been trying to explore new types of games and themes to sort of branch out and find things I might find more interesting, or which are less demanding of my time, or --heck-- just more suited to my aging tastes and interests. Apparently one can play too many shooters, or too many third person games, such that the familiarity of those genres can become predictable and tedious (I'm looking at you, Atomfall!) but there are entire types of games I've avoided in the past, and one of those is the 2D style side scroller. These games come in a variety of flavors, but all have as a commonality a fixed perspective and a play pattern that has you moving, usually from left to right on the screen, experiencing something and maybe solving puzzles, surviving and unlocking story bits. Variants abound such as the roguelites (Dead Cells, Ultros) and the metroidvanias (Shadow Labyrinth, Metroid Dread) but the one subgenre of this style I have been enjoying the most is a style I am not sure has a proper name: games like Limbo, Inside and Little Nightmares all seem to fall into this special category of what I might imagine could be defined as "survival side scrollers."

Little Nightmares is in its third game and I decided now was the time to catch up on it. The Enhanced Complete Edition released on the Switch 2 at the same time as the third game, so I picked it up to start here. Interestingly they haven't released the enhanced edition of Little Nightmares II on Switch 2 yet, and the regular Switch edition looks very muddy and unpleasant on Switch 2 (it is not taking advantage of the souped up new hardware), so I am currently playing through that one on a Steam copy. But this review is about the first game.

Your character is apparently named 6 although I am not sure this information is communicated anywhere in the game that I found (I discovered my son has played all of these and is, similar to many other franchises out there I know nothing of, he by contrast is bursting with lore and esoteric details on these games). 6 appears to be a little girl in a raincoat, and the somewhat exaggerated graphical style of the game which is a 3D/2D (2.5D) format exudes a weird "hyper-real" feel to the environments and characters. They look cartoony and exaggerated (in a grotesque way) but the whole time I played it felt like I was just maneuvering my tiny person through endless dioramas of exquisite detail. It makes this game stand out amongst the rest, and I can see why a lot of people love this series as a result.

Anyway, 6 wakes up in the bowels of what you learn is a huge, monolithic and almost abyssal ocean liner. She seeks escape, but escape requires going through level upon level, looking for a way out while encountering the monstrous residents of the vessel. A custodian who seems to keep children in order to be slaughtered for food, who is blind but grasps with freakishly long arms and short legs. A pair of cooks who harvest food for the passengers, who you later meet and discover are all effectively grotesque ogres, gluttonous and mad creatures who will scramble to eat you if you are spotted. The final boss is possibly the one who runs it all, a vain woman dressed like a geisha who is the only thin creature on the ship but also possesses powers of shadow and a terrible hatred of her own image in mirrors. 

Amidst all this are other captured children, many beyond saving, and tiny mushroom-capped creatures called nomes who seem hesitant about you (though in a DLC playthrough of another child trapped on the ship they prove quite helpful and even friendly). 6 must make her way through each region of the ship, doing what she can, even as she finds she is gripped by her own intense hunger. Honestly, her debilitating periodic hunger attacks had me wondering if she was basically a child version of the ogres, eventually destined to transform into one of them....until I got to the story's end (which I won't spoil) and I was like....ah. Wow. Okay then.....

If you are wondering if this game is for you, I have the following observations on my playthrough of the main game and the expansion story (about a boy who tries to escape as well, via a different route): first and most important, I managed to get through the entire main campaign without consulting an FAQ or playthrough. I can't say the same for the expansion, which I think was targeting the more hardcore players, and an FAQ was helpful toward the end. Would I have figured out the rather myriad puzzles at the end on my own? Eventually I might have, but I'd probably have spent an extra hour puzzling it out and backtracking a lot....I did that even with the guide.

The second thing to know is that the 2.5D perspective means that unlike many other side-scrollers/metroidvanias this game lets you move around within each articulate and detailed area. You sometimes have to make jumps based on where you think you are going to land, only to discover you miscalculated, or the game's queues don't quite align with what you think is the correct trajectory. This doesn't pose a problem like 90% of the time, but that 10% can be frustrating. There's a sequence where 6 is being chased by a veritable wall of ogreish flesh and you escape with a daring leap over a chasm to a hook, and I think I had to try that one twenty times before I got it right. So...patience will be necessary in certain spots.

Luckily the game is built around a save point system that is well aware you are possibly at a rough spot, so it is generous in providing plenty of close proximity save locations, where 6 will reawaken as if from a bad dream. Usually if something got you the first time, you can (usually) navigate correctly around the problem on round two. Except, of course, for those handful of spots. You'll know 'em when you get to them.

All told, I really enjoyed my playthrough, and plowed through the DLC expansion immediately after. I also enjoyed the ending, it was not at all what I expected in either case. I then immediately jumped in to Little Nightmares II as a result. Definite A! The Switch 2 edition is a solid thumbs up, but I am sure the Steam version of the Enhanced Edition is also well worth it. 

The 21st Day of Horror: Spectregraph TPB

 

Spectregraph TPB (Mark Tynion IV and Christian Ward)

If you aren't into the graphic novel scene, or are mostly only familiar with it from the DC/Marvel side of the picture, you may not know just how many incredibly good graphic novels out there are in the horror genre (also, the crime genre). Image and Dark Horse are the largest non-big-two names most are familiar with, but other publishers exist and are knocking it out of the park. In this case, DSTLRY is releasing several remarkable graphic novels in a larger format, of which Spectregraph is my favorite so far.

The story focuses on an immense, mysterious mansion once the domain of a wealthy American industrialist named Ambrose. Ambrose was obsessed with the occult and belonged to a secret society of like-minded individuals, but in the sixties he grew disenchanted with the lack of evidence of supernatural phenomenon and ghosts in particular. He took a new approach: he wanted to find out how to make ghosts. The house became a lifelong project with his partner, a man who would outlive him. When Ambrose died, the house went for sale on the market. 

Enter Jamie, a harried mess of a woman who is stressed about losing her job as a real estate agent, and also so frazzled she leaves her infant son at home alone. Jamie rushes to meet with the mysterious party interested in viewing the house for possible sale, and meets Vesper, a morbid and depressed goth girl who represents the mysterious client. Together they enter the house for a tour of the mysterious Ambrose's decades-long project.

Vesper and Jamie arrive in the centerpiece of the eerie mansion eventually: a chamber which is code locked and key locked, and reveals an immense ocular object that renders them both unconscious, though not before Vesper reveals something stranger is going on by knocking out Jamie. When all is done, they find that the building is locked down, the key is missing, and horrific ghosts that appear to be disembodied masses of body parts roam the halls, full of harmful malice. The two are forced to work together to get to the heart of the mystery....a mystery in which Vesper reveals that the Spectegraph was supposed to kill her and turn her into a ghost, except it didn't work! 

I hesitate to write any more on Spectregraph as it is a worthy read and if you find the lead in above tantalizing, I suggest finding a copy and reading it, instead. Tynion has been pretty consistently knocking it out of the park with his horror trades (WorldTr33, Something is Killing the Children and The Nice House by the Lake are all outstanding works of his), and Christian Ward's art style works exceedingly well for Spectregraph's mashup of haunted puzzle mansion and disembodied floating gore bag ghosts. 

The 20th Day of Horror: This Wretched Valley by Jenny Kiefer

 

This Wretched Valley by Jenny Kiefer

I admit, this book's striking cover featuring an ominous cliff face in the image of a skull was enough to draw me in, but then I stuck it on my bookshelf for an inordinately long period of time before eventually snagging a download on my Kobo, where I then plowed through it. While I was not as engaged as I was with some other recent reads, Jenny Kiefer is a pretty good author, and has a firm sense of how to move the story along, so while the book is fairly slow and methodical for the first half, somewhere around the 60% mark it picks up the pace and ends on a rather suitably gruesome note.

The tale spins around four professional climbers/social media stars (two couples and their dog) who use a flyover in a remote wilderness area to find undiscovered scalable cliffs that they can add to their repertoire of potential excursions. A glitchy read on lidar scans reveals what appears to be the motherlode: an amazing looking cliff face in the remote wilderness that no one knows about. Never mind that the readings seem a bit....glitchy? They plan an expedition and head on off. The team starts off excited, though a visit to a local small town diner leaves them with the by now traditional warning from the local folk (waitress, in this case) that things aren't necessarily all right out in the area they are heading to....

The prologue has already forecast that disaster awaits, so the reader knows that it is clear everyone on this expedition is likely doomed. Perhaps the main problem with the story ends up being this expectation, mixed with a rather slow build on the threat as for a good half of the novel the problems are focused on the subtle stuff, such as the group noticing that they can't seem to backtrack, or how their GPS readings don't seem to be adding up. It slowly moves into a more "city folk under threat by a palpable evil wilderness" trope but then we start to get hints of the backstory...ghosts of the past, things that have happened to those who came here before the climbers. At some point the book finally moves forward as the hikers begin to experience injury and eventually madness, and then things get crazy as they begin to experience what are debatably either hallucinations or actual ghosts. By the end of the book it is quite obvious that the supernatural nature of the evil and malign presence which occupies the very soil of the region is palpable, and the fates of all are sealed.

This book relies on a fairly traditional set of tropes, including the "scary woods will get you," thematic, the idea of a haunted area which is not so much a threat due to ghosts but rather a malign sentience itself, and like many more conventional horror novels less effort is made to explore the nature of the supernatural as presented in the novel than to ultimately accept that it simply exists, and it is evil and out to get you. As a result the book plays out fairly conventionally, and while I enjoyed reading it, I do wish it had a few surprises. Indeed (spoiler) the biggest surprise was also a tiny happy one: the dog is the sole survivor.

Reading this not long after Clark's The Tower left me drawing comparisons between the two. I think Kiefer's novel is actually a bit stronger in that it feels like she worked out the plot and pacing rather well, so I didn't ever feel like she had changed the rules of the threat or deviated from the planned story to follow a lead.....the story goes exactly where it intended to. This both works in its favor and against it, as I would not at all have minded a bit more exploration of the nature of the haunted wilderness, even maybe a glimpse as to the true nature of the evil. The characters of the story are not, unfortunately the sorts of people to do that kind of investigation; they are ordinary people facing unsurvivable circumstances, and only get the barest opportunity to question what is happening to them. Late in the story, for example, they have a moment where one of the characters (Dylan) uses her camera phone to try recording the supernatural manifestations she is witnessing, and realizes that the camera is not showing her any of it....she begins to suspect then that something is making them see things, but too late to really save anyone.

Overall, a fun read, you may enjoy it a lot if you like "supernatural nature is out to kill you" type stories, but I think I wish the four main characters had been a bit more relatable, and there are chunks of the book I feel dragged on a bit before interesting things started happening that were a bit too slow for the sort of story this was telling. A fat novella stretched to book length. I give it a C+.

The 19th Day of Horror: Alien: earth

 

Alien : Earth (Hulu)

Well, it felt inevitable: Alien: Earth is a complete series on Hulu now, and since my household is fairly obsessed with the Alien franchise as a whole (I used to be able to claim the honor of being the Alien aficionado around here, but my son has since usurped that role from me) it is only logical I include this in the 31 Days of Horror reviews.

So right off the bat, Alien: Earth is one of the more successful miniseries on streaming in 2025 so odds are if you are at all interested in this universe then you've already seen it. My understanding is that even non fans of the movies will probably enjoy this, since the story of the eight episode series is a fairly self-contained tale; the ubiquitous alien is introduced in a manner which does not require having seen 7 other movies, and focuses on topics which expand the setting of the movies in directions that are hard to explore in a two hour movie format. 

Alien: Earth does something that I am always pleasantly surprised about: it uses its time on screen wisely, and it feels like every minute on screen counts toward the motion of the story, characters and plot such that it does not feel like there's very much filler at all, a common problem with a lot of television series. In fact there is so much going on in the eight episodes of the show that there is no pat resolution to many story elements; it doesn't so much end on a cliffhanger as a "and this will definitely be continued, either on screen or off" sense. I don't know if they've announced a 2nd season yet, but my understanding is the creators already have a script ready.

So what is it about? The plot is divided between two themes, with one plot literally crashing in to the other. The first story focuses on the corporation Prodigy, revealed as one of five megascorporations, and a rival of Weyland-Yutani, which have divvied up control of Earth after what is suggested to have been a very tumultuous period of conflict. Prodigy's territories include two locations of importance: the masive arcology of New Seoul, and  Pacific Rim isle nick-named Neverland where research and development is working under Prodigy's mastermind, "The Boy Cavalier," a supremely obsessive fellow with lots of weird quirks, including a tendency to go barefoot everywhere, along with a deep obsession with Peter Pan. He is clearly a cypher for our own modern Megacorps and their eccentric and often out-of-touch leadership. 

The story starts on Neverland, where Prodigy is attempting to create hybrids, the term to describe human minds uploaded to imprint perfectly into synthetic minds and bodies. They gain the consent of children who are suffering from debilitating and fatal diseases from which they would otherwise never recover, and the experiment is going along quite well, with a handful of children whose minds have suddenly been uploaded into powerful adult synthetic bodies. The five are given new names from Peter Pan, and our lead character is Wendy, who seems to be especially quick to adjust to her new capabilities. She is also obsessed with her older brother from her former life, who works in New Seoul (Prodigy City) as an emergency medtech with the civil defense force.

Throughout the series, the focus on the synthetic hybrids is one of questioning whether this is experiment is working as intended. Similarly to the themes in Alien: Romulus, where the Weyland-Yutani researchers harvest the plagarius praepotens* to engineer genetically modified humans who can survive in space (with at best dubious results, per that movie), Prodigy instead is looking at using synthetic bodies to give the minds of humanity immortality and enhancement. But...is the mind of a person uploaded in this manner really the same person? They use children because the minds of the young are still pliable and capable of being uploaded with better success rates (mostly)...or is that just part of the Boy Cavalier's Peter Pan obsession? What happens when the hybrids realise that they really aren't human, or even perhaps sympathetic to humanity? Or even their old selves anymore? The show tackles and plays with these concepts with fascinating success, making it distinctly interesting science fiction in that regard.

But this is an Alien series, so the other plot kicks off quickly, when a massive deep space exploration craft arrives in orbit and crash-lands in the heart of New Seoul. The massive ship has suffered a critical failure but survives the journey, at least in part due to the sole surviving crewman Morrow, who introduces cyborgs into the setting. Morrow's cybernetics are old; the ship departed on its journey 65 years earlier, and his cybernetics ad thematically in the style of the technology used for synthetic androids in the Alien universe. One also gets a sense that Morrow's basic humanity is a bit eroded (a nod to the cyberpunk genre's concept of cyber-psychosis, maybe) though later on as more of his backstory on the ship is revealed I think a lot of his attitude is completely understandable. 

The ship is full of specimens. It was a Weyland-Yutani venture into space, set out long ago when presumably far fewer alien worlds had been visited, to find and return with living specimens of use to the corporation. The failure at its very end, and its crash into Prodigy City/New Seoul is part of the mystery, as well as whether or not the civil defense force can react to the catastrophic results of the crash and eventually figure out a means of containment. The story of the hybrids coincides with this tale when Wendy's brother is identified as being on site, and she convinces her creators to let the hybrid team participate in rescue and recovery operations. Headed by their synthetic handler Kirsh (who is himself weaved into the story as an example of a very old synthetic model), the hybrid teams discovers the real purpose of the ship, and also that five of the specimens on the vessel are, in fact, extremely deadly predators....of which our franchise star xenomorph is but one!

I could write a long time about this show, but advise instead it is better to go watch it for yourself. I will make a few side comments however: one is that there is some debate on whether the show is canonically in alignment with the movies. Some clues sort of suggest no, based on bits and pieces shown suggesting Weyland-Yutani had merged as a corporation before the Prometheus ever set off. The show creators admitted that they didn't pay too much attention to the movies taking place prior to the time period of the show (2120, 2 years before the original movie, and some years after Prometheus and Alien: Covenant), so if you were not a fan of those two prequels then this may not bug you at all. For my take, the Alien franchise as a whole has only been loosely consistent with a lot of these little details, so such inconsistencies (if they really are inconsistent) do not bother me; somewhere someone is writing an official novel or game module that reconciles such discrepancies, I am sure.

Anyway, stop reading about it and go check it out! Solid A+ and my most satisfying watch of the year so far (admittedly from someone who just does not usually get into streaming TV much). 

*A name which, if you immediately know what it is, marks you as a true dedicate (or maybe you just payed close attention to Rook's rambling commentary in Alien: Romulus)

The 18th Day of Horror: Limbo (PC Steam Edition)

Limbo (PC, 2011)

Fair disclosure! I played and completed Limbo on the Asus Rog Ally X, which was an excellent experience. Limbo came out in 2011 apparently, although I thought it was a more recent title. If you are a fan of side-scrolling puzzler/adventure titles then there's a good chance you have already played this fine little game. If you are like me and have not, then I definitely recommend it. 

Limbo is, honestly, a creepy little title that conveys horror through an unexplained, nightmarish world your small child-like character must travel through. His reason for being here is uncertain, his goal is uncertain (escape?) and the reason everything wants to murder him is also unclear, other than the world (Limbo, presumably) is an incredibly hostile place, literally dog-eat-dog. 

Since the story is vague, the horror of the world is conveyed entirely through the experience of moving through it and being killed...sometimes a lot....and then finding yourself waking up a bit before whatever killed you giving you chance to circumvent or thwart whatever it is. The game, like many side-scrolling 2D platformers of its nature, relies on the player to intuit clues as to resolving puzzles through environmental queues. It's not bad about this, actually, though I did consult a walkthrough on about four occasions when I was otherwise stumped. Sometimes the action you need to take is even less obvious. As an example, early on you run into a gigantic spider which waits patiently to murder you. Earlier you spot a bear trap in a tree. While it was clear to me that that trap had something to do with solving the spider issue, it was less clear how to get it down from the branch where it was hanging. The solution was novel (and makes sense) but not intuitive at first as the game had not telegraphed that the solution was even really a mechanical option in the game.

Later on the game gets more platformer-like and the puzzles deal with more physics, especially when you find yourself in the depths of a grim cityscape/industrial factory that, being in Limbo and all, is utterly nightmarish and designed to kill you. I have often hit walls on games like this in the past where the dexterity necessary to pass through such tests is more than I can muster, but Limbo proved to be just fine; a few such areas required some repetition and repeated dying but eventually I figured it out.

Overall a fun experience. I took about four hours to complete the game, which meant it was a satisfying evening experience and that in itself was a pleasant surprise. I have many games in my Steam backlog that are 60 to 100 hours to complete (or more....looking at you Assassin's Creed franchise!) but I would take 15-20 shorter games like Limbo over a monstrous AAA game any day of the week. Solid little game, I will give it an A!

Tron: Ares Review

I'm interrupting my mad string of daily 31 Days of Horror posts to write about seeing Tron: Ares with the family tonight. I had lowered expectations for this movie because while I enjoyed Tron: Legacy it was not my favorite movie by any means and I had many issues with it. The original Tron holds a special place in my heart, but is distinctly a beast of its time, and aged about as well as a movie trying to do CGI in a nascent era where CGI was all simple vector graphics could (and the rest wasn't even CGI, but rather simulated CGI). That said, I was a kid when the first one came out, and I read the entire novelization the night before seeing the movie, and my mental visual of the book was never going to compete with the poor film....it didn't stand a chance.

So going in to Tron: Ares I did not expect the following: that I not only liked it, I thought it kicked ass. Possibly my second favorite movie of 2025 next to Superman, and may immediately have joined a small but worthy passel of guilty pleasure movies, films I just viscerally love to watch. This list includes Predator 2, Robocop 2, The Thing, Tropic Thunder and The Life Aquatic, to give you sampling of the films I deeply love without justification. Tron: Ares is instantly on this list for me. 

For one thing: The Trent Reznor Nine Inch Nails soundtrack kicks ass and elevates this movie immediately. It is a worthy successor to the retired Daft Punk of the last film. For another thing, this movie maintains a lovely, simple premise that expands the Tron universe without going wild. It raises subtle and interesting questions about what happens when the beings of the digital universe (the Grid) grow accustomed to the existence of the users, and no longer hold theological reverence for them. Instead, we focus on the idea that Dillinger's company and grandson have figured out how to use a variation on 3D printing to create real world hard-light constructs in which the programs can load themselves, and the new security program Ares is one such program. As Ares experiences the world, he realizes that he values something beyond his role as a program in service to Dillinger, and this leads to conflict as he is opposed by the more dedicated and single-minded program Athena. 

Meanwhile, Eve is the CEO of Flynn's old company Encom, and she's trying to discover the secret of permanence....how to make hard light constructs turn into real world things forever. Her work is revealing what amounts to replicator technology from Star Trek; making real food in a 3D printer, for example, that people can eat. In contrast, Dillinger's grandson is focused entirely on the entities of the Grid, and how they can be weaponized. This drives the conflict of the story, which is delivered in glorious, ultra stylish and cool fashion to amazing NIN music, making an almost mesmerizing experience. This really is what I wanted Tron: Legacy to be more like. 

Supposedly the movie isn't doing too great at the box office. I hope it does well enough for a sequel, because I liked it enough to really want more Tron now. Also, this movie made me genuinely like Jared Leto as Ares, and I am still trying to wrap my head around that. Solid A, and this one goes into my short list of films I'll rewatch regularly.

The 17th Day of Horror: The Tower by Simon Clark

 

The Tower by Simon Clark

Originally released in 2005 and published as a mass market paperback under the Pinnacle Imprint, The Tower is Simon Clark in fine form, and also a bit of a change from some of his more popular books (Blood Crazy in particular comes to mind). It is firmly in the haunted house corner of the horror genre, but takes a bit of a twist: in this case the house itself is the evil menace at the heart of the story. I read this a couple months ago so I'll be a bit briefer in my recollection of the details, but I did enjoy this book and felt it was worth talking about in the 31 Days of Horror-thon I have subjected myself to.

The eponymous Tower of the novel is in fact an ancient building, dating back to medieval times and possibly earlier, around which later construction was built out, enclosing the original ancient structure deep inside a much larger mansion. The mansion was an important staging ground for British air defense in World War II and in the years leading up to the time in the novel it was a retirement home for the elderly before being shut down and abandoned and turned by whoever owns the property into a rental in a remote region of England (if you live in England you can correct me on exactly where it is at), accessible only by taking a ferry and crossing a broad wetlands region. 

It is to this house which an aspiring young band of musicians who have recently secured a lucrative contract decide to sequester themselves away in for a month, to compose their new album and strike their fame and fortune. The group consists of a narcissistic leader, the guy who composes the songs and brings along his two girlfriends, his drummer, guitarist, keyboard guy, and a gal whose another girlfriend I think, and whose skillset I can't recall offhand (and apologies, I don't remember anyone's names and can't be bothered to look it up right now)....each is an interesting enough character, though maybe the bandmates are all a little too similar except for the self-absorbed leader, who stands out.

As the group arrives in the small town nearby and leaves the ferry, they find themselves in a drenching storm and stumble across their first omen, an exausted stray dog on the road. One of the bandmembers takes pity on the dog and brings it into the car. This dog is an important character in the book from this point on. 

Anyway, they come to this spooky house, notice it's odd architecture, and are perplexed at a clock which seems to blare from every room equally and goes off on the hour, often inconveniently while they are trying to record. They barely have a day's time to do some practice when they've had it with this clock and try to find its source....and it looks like the source may be in the weird smaller building/tower buried inside the inner building. 

The first night things start happening. One of the team has an oppressive dream of the house literally closing in on him, crushing him to death, but he wakes up thinking maybe it was a dream but his chest bruise suggests otherwise. The next day things get worse, as more horrific things are imagined and one of the girls disappears on the property. There's an old groundskeeper, it turns out, and we the readers learn he is a slave to whatever entity possesses the house. Indeed, the entity may have been there a very long time, and demands sacrifice periodically. I don't think the group gets further than another day or so before they are all keenly aware they are being hunted by the house, which seems determined to stop their music and kill them.

About the biggest problem I can identify in The Tower is that over the course of reading it I began to get the feeling that Simon Clark had a good core premise for a story, and he filled in the gaps and bits as he went along. The hint of the house's ancient nature, perhaps originally the location of an ancient shrine used to appease some ancient chthonic old one beneath the earth was never more than hinted at, which is a shame, because I would have liked to see a bit more of this. We get a lot of grisly dream sequences where people witness their own deaths, then later that death confronts them in the real world and with luck they might escape it....and in the end, the dog they found at the beginning turns out to be a shockingly important key to their escape. 

I was motivated to plow through the book over several days and enjoyed every minute of it. I had a vague feeling I had read it many years ago when it first came out, but my memory was so faded on that first read that I was able to enjoy it with surprises aplenty. Although I own a copy of the physical book in my library, I snagged a copy on Kindle and read that (the better to keep my original intact and uncreased; it's an old book now!) Well worth a read if you like weird house haunt tales, or if you happen to enjoy Simon Clark's writings. I am a big fan of his, and this book, like all of his works, was well worth the time.

The 16th Day of Horror: Deep Gravity TPB

 

Deep Gravity TPB

Released by Dark Horse Comics in 2015, this graphic novel is based on a story by Mike Richardson, scripted by Gabriel Hardman and Corinna Bechko, and illustrated by Fernando Baldo. Deep Gravity is a fine example of what Dark Horse Comics does best: mini series (repackaged as graphic novels) focused on distinct stories that don't need to tie into some sort of existing IP universe. Deep Gravity is particularly entertaining in that it feels like a graphic novel adaptation of a twenty-tens movie we never got to see. It's one part explosive scifi action and one part space survival horror, and nestles well in the "horror SF" tradition without feeling like it is riding on any specific film or story's coat tails.

Deep Gravity's tale is about the arrival of the deep space freighter Vanguard around the remote world Poseidon, located around a fictional red dwarf three light years from Earth. The corporation Maelstrom holds the contracts to supply and manage the colony located on Poseidon, which is a higher gravity world with a unique ecosystem of creatures that exhibit both plant and animal-like traits, but the toxic elements in the ecosystem plus a higher exposure to radioactive particles (presumably due to a weaker magnetosphere, or its proximity to a red dwarf star?) means the people assigned to duties on Poseidon have to rotate out every three years, the maximum safe period humans can occupy the planet before risk of death goes up exponentially. 

Our protagonist is Steve Paxon, an engineer who volunteered to join the three-year journey as one of the lone crew on the Vanguard to remain conscious as a ship tech while the rest of the new colonists are kept in hibernation. His motives aren't driven by money or altruism, but rather to follow his ex-girlfiend Michelle, who was arrived three years ago for a tour of duty on Poseidon and is about to finish out her rotation. His three years on the Vanguard gave him time to reflect on what a poor life choice this was.

No sooner has Steve landed on Poseidon with the rotation of staff than do bad things start happening, as the flora/fauna of Poseidon are reminiscent of Harry Harrison's Deathworld novels; it's a dangerous planet. His pilot buddy his badly injured after Steve decides he wants to go look out the security perimeter for fun, then he distracts Michelle when she's trying to assist in loading a larger beast for transport; Maelstrom hauls a lot of specimens back to Earth as part of hits contract, you see. Either way, Steve is a bad luck magnet who can't stop distracting people at critical moments. 

The story ramps up when the Vanguard, having delivered the new team for the colony loads up and returns to the Vanguard in orbit with a mix of the old crew rotating out from the colony plus the many specimens they have on board, including an immense, insanely deadly octopoidal beast called the galeocrinus, alias the "Leo," a hyper-predatory beast that can squeeze into lots of narrow confines with the instincts and intellect of an octopus and the appetite of a bottomless pit. That would be all fine, if it remained confined.....

After docking while moving the cargo around, something odd happens, and the Vanguard shifts trajectory for mysterious reasons right into the path of an asteroid, and ends up being critically damaged. The destructive wake of the asteroid leaves many of the crew and creatures dead, but Steven and a handful of survivors work to escape the wreckage as it begins orbital decay, while the Leo also survived and begins hunting them. It turns into a race against time to figure out what happened, how to escape, and if Michelle is still alive to be rescued.

This was a great read! Not a long read as the original print run was only four issues, but well worth it if you enjoy a good scifi/action/disaster themed survival horror tale that manages to do a good job within the genre without feeling like it is borrowing from any other property in the cluttered horror SF genre. 

I think it might only have been improved a bit if Baldo managed to make a few of the crew look a bit more distinct from one another (Steve is utterly generic so does not stand out among other utterly generic crew men in certain scenes), and one might imagine that with more time or pages to expand on the broader story we could have been treated to a bit more of Poseidon itself. The book ends on a definitive note, but also suggests maybe a future story could revisit the universe of Deep Gravity. I'd give it a B+.  

The 15th Day of Horror: Ugetsu (1953)

 

Ugetsu (1953)

One thing people around me can probably tell you is that I just won't shut up about how much I love the movie Ugetsu, and I have watched it several times now, each time finding some new bit or piece to enjoy. Originally produced and released in 1953 by director Kenji Mizoguchi, Ugetsu is a period piece set durng a period of civil war in the 16th century in Japan. While it is, strictly speaking, not a horror film it is almost more of a blend of genres, reflecting the kwaidan tradition of the period in which it is set, in which weird tales can often blend with more conventional narratives to tell a fable and perhaps even a moral lesson (or, just as often, a "just so" story).

The story focuses on two families in a small village near Lake Biwa, trying desperately to survive during an eruption of civil war in which the peasantry of the land are treated as nothing more than a resource to be abused and discarded. Genjuro and his friend Tobei conspire to take their ceramic wares across the lake to the city where it is still possible to make a living, and while they try to bring their wives along at first, fear of the risk overcomes Genjuro who leaves his wife Miyage behind with their young child. Tobei's wife Ohama stayes with him.....but as things progress, everything falls apart. 

Genjuro makes money selling his wares, but he encounters the beautiful noblewoman Wakasa, who quickly lures him to her estates, despite mysterious warning from the locals, where he becomes enmeshed in an affair with her. Tobei aspires to become a real warrior, and to seek the status of a samurai; by pure luck he manages to be in the right spot at the right time and manages to ambush a warrior with a suit of armor, which he takes and then presents himself to the army where he quickly advances in status. His wife, now lost in the conflict, ends up recruited into prostitution.

Without saying anymore, I will right off the bat identify this as a solid A+ film, absolutely worth a watch from the perspective of a haunting tale of historical drama mixed with the weird horror conventions of a kwaidan. Read on for spoilers of this 72 year old movie!

SPOILER SECTION

So far the horror of the story is primarily of small town folk getting swept up in a time of severe conflict and the damage it does to their otherwise more innocent natures....but the horror creeps in with Genjuro's tale as he eventually discovers that his new love, Lady Wakasa, is in fact a yurei, a ghost woman who perished and her estate burned to the ground as a result of the civil wars. Her covetous ghost does not want to let him go, until he at last realizes what he has fallen victim to and manages to escape. Meanwhile Tobei is reveling in his barely earned military success when, taking his men to a brotherl, he runs into his forgotten wife and realizes suddenly what he lost in order to gain his warrior's status. 

Eventually, the three converge back on their home village, realizing they enjoye the simpler life so much better. For poor Genjuro his descent into the haunted world is not yet over, as he returns to his wife and home, seemingly intact as she has waited for him all this time, only to discover the following morning that she, too, was a yurei, and she held on only long enough to see his return. 

Ugetsu is such an amazing movie, it is absolutely worth watching for anyone who meets one of these criteria: enjoys Japanese weird tales (kwaidan), enjoy Japanese cinema in general, enjoy period piece films, enjoy engaging historial dramas, or enjoy ghost stories in general. As I said above...this is a solid A+ for me in and my short list of all time favorite movies. It's available on streaming in various places and I believe Criterion has it on blu-ray.   

The 14th Day of Horror: Rabid (1977)

 

Rabid (1977)

Right off the bat this is one of Cronenberg's earliest horror films, and one which apparently garnered a cult following. It's main character, Rose, was played by Marylin Chambers who is otherwise better know for her work in the adult film industry, and I think this might have been her only "normal" acting credit. She actually holds up quite well as the protagonist of the film, and in true Cronenberg form there is no happy ending here, for anyone.

A quick rant: while trying to find a good cover image for this movie, I notice that a lot of them use a brief image midway into the film of a woman from the hospital who freezes to death in a walk-in freezer. It is a brief throwaway scene, and I am entirely unclear on why this image is used so prominently in most cover art depictions, given it is entirely unrepresentative of the rest of the movie.

The premise of the film lies within the venn intersection of plague/pandemic films and zombie apocalypse films. Had I known this was a sort of soft apocalypse zombie plague film I would have watched it a long time ago, actually. Rose and her boyfriend are part of a tragic motorcycle accident, which takes place near the Keloid special surgical hospital focused primarily on cosmetic surgery, but the good Doctor Keloid is also involved in various experimental procedures. To save Rose from deformity and loss of skin, he submits her to a specialized treatment of skin grafts that involve an apparently untested process using morphogenetic treatment. Unknown to the doctor, this treatment causes Rose to change....she heals quickly, but also grows a stinger like appendage which can emerge from near her armpit. This stinger can drink the blood of victims while anesthetizing them and later causing memory loss.  Later, the victims recover, but within hours go insane as they manifest an irrational hunger and a desperate need for violence. These infected can, in turn, transmit this sort of "super rabies" to anyone they bite or come into close contact with.  

As the movie progresses the disease spreads and soon Montreal is a hotbed of a deadly pandemic. The story unfolds at a tense but measured pace, and focuses on Rose as she at first gives in to her own hunger for blood, even as her incredibly lackluster boyfriend tries to find her. She eventually realizes she may be the source of the plague, and comes up with a way to test and confirm this. The film ends with Montreal potentially in a new era of perpetual martial law as the only solution the government has for containment and treatment is to shoot the manifesting infected.

This film holds up really well. It's got that seventies vibe, which is important to understanding the movie; the pace of the story and the progress of the overall reaction to a growing epidemic are suitable for the time period. This grounded sense of realism makes the movie feel just a bit more realistic and thus a bit scarier than some more over-the-top films of similar nature.

Al in all, this is a movie you will best enjoy if you like vintage horror, but I honestly think it holds up surprisingly well, even if the events of the film would have a harder time making sense in modern cinema. Rose's mutation, for example, would require a bit more explanation as to why she grows a deadly plague-bearing, blood-drinking stinger, for example. But in 1977? Makes perfect sense. Solid B!  

The 13th Day of Horror: Monster Island (2024)

 

Monster Island (2024)

This awesome hidden gem from Singapore is playing on Shudder right now, so I definitely advise checking it out if you are a fan of classic monster movies. Also called Orang Ixan, Monster Islands starts in 1942 during World War II, on a Japanese Prison ship transporting American POWs and Japanese prisoners, specifically a former Japanese soldier named Saito who is being returned to Japan for execution. He is chained to an Australian (or British?) POW named Bronson, and not long after the ship is attacked and sunk by American fighter planes. The two washed up on a remote island, seemingly the sole survivors, and are forced to learn to trust one another as they realize that they are not alone on the island....some sort of monster is hunting them....

This movie is a nice, component production with good FX, a good budget, a smart action/horror story focused entirely on Bronson and Saito, with a few other survivors figuring in to the mix about midway in.  It owes a bit of it's lineage to a few films: the obvious one references as point of inspiration is the Creature from the black Lagoon, but I was reminded slightly of a couple other films as well, specifically ENemy Mine, and of course Predator. It's hard to throw soldiers into a jungle island and have a monster stalk them and not be reminded a bit of Predator. 

One thing the movie is not doing is riffing off of the mythos, as while the creature is a bit like an aquatic Deep One-like monster, the aquatic beast is most definitely just a cunning creature and not at all related to the spooky lineage of cosmic horror. The movie takes its queues from the more conventional monster movie genre, and does a great job of it. 

I actually was really happy to stumble on this movie while browsing Shudder, as I needed a break from the incredibly bad The Old Ones and the goofy, fun but ultimately far too silly Mark of the Werewolf. A movie that was earnest in its effort to make a serious movie of survival horror with actual characters and situations you care about was a refreshing change of pace. Solid B! Similar to Primitive War, it appears that there is a foreign film market out there which is just knocking hits out of the park.