MOVIE DIARY 2023: THE HALLOWEEN SPECIAL

Hello! Happy Halloween! I got a huge mess of horror movies to talk about, and leading the way is my special guest, horror cartoonist Adam Szym! Adam’s been here before to talk about Noroi: The Curse (2005), so you know, he’s sort of on the horror beat. Glad to have him back this time to talk about a Romero classic!

Day Of The Dead (1985) - dir. George Romero
SPECIAL GUEST WRITER: ADAM SZYM

I tapped out on zombie fiction just before the fever pitch of its popularity, when you couldn’t enter a comic book shop without being faced with a wall of The Walking Dead Funko Pops and assailed by overheard snippets of dire “how I would survive a zombie apocalypse” conversations. The genre had, and still has in my opinion, far wore out its welcome and had almost universally settled into the equally tiresome twin modes of dour and reactionary survivalist wet dreams or cheap and cringeworthy horror comedy (Shaun of the Dead notwithstanding).

Recently, though, I had a hankering to revisit Romero’s films. I decided to start with DAY OF THE DEAD after realizing that I remembered almost nothing about it. Vague images came to mind: Bub the talking zombie; hands bursting through drywall made to look like stone; military fatigues running around the darkness of a cave…but little else. This would be fine except that I’ve spent the last 18 years telling anyone who asked that this is my favorite of Romero’s Dead films.

I began to wonder whether this opinion I’d held for so long was truthful or whether it had instead come from that common teenage desire to be different and contrarian and to always stump loudest for whatever was most obscure in a given set of things. But now, having revisited it for the first time since high school I can safely say my opinion was genuine; or at the very least it’s genuine now.

I was surprised to discover that, despite DAY being the least famous and least renowned of the DEAD films, it’s also the one that popular culture seems to have latched onto hardest. For better or worse the most popular descendants of these films all feel as if they’re relitigating and regurgitating this film in particular.

THE LAST OF US, 28 DAYS LATER, and THE WALKING DEAD all feel more like children of DAY than NIGHT OR DAWN, at least to me. All of them are interested in institutional breakdown and madness, in factions and their reactionary mistrust of outsiders, and both TLOU and 28 DAYS LATER feature foolhardy and ultimately disastrous attempts to experiment with, understand, or wrangle the contagion. Above all else, though, the piece of DAY’s DNA which has most profoundly impacted the genre is a simple one: people are more dangerous than zombies.

Romero’s DEAD films are, popular culture tells us, a deeply cynical series of films. Biting (pun intended) social satire and scathing indictments of modernity in the guise of B-movie shlock. While most of that is accurate I was surprised and impressed in equal measure by how un-cynical these films actually are.

The late Cormac McCarthy carries a similar reputation for writing books we’re told are dead-eyed, nihilistic works which revel in violence and misery. But I don’t buy it. Far from being nihilistic I think his interest in the capricious nature of life and the randomness of human violence is deeply rooted in a genuine love for people, or at least a righteous and unfulfilled expectation of how people ought to be treated and rarely are.

These are far from misanthropic films. They’re frank about humanity, sure. They’re interested in the warts and all, and DAY in particular loudly acknowledges how much more acutely dangerous humans are when compared to mindless shambling zombies. But Romero’s films are also humanist at their core in a way that very few of their descendants are.

I rarely hear anyone talk about the writing of these films. We hear so much about their historical importance, the incredible craft they display despite their meager budgets, and of course the effects work. DAY’s effects are stunning, by the way, and the film would absolutely be remarkable for that alone. But for me what really puts these films over the top is the writing. These are movies with perfectly spare and understated dialogue, lean plotting, and subtly emotional character work. There’s so little there but it all works so well.

The protagonists feel like real people who happen to be stuck in a shitty situation instead of people tailor made to slot into a zombie film (I’m looking at you, Norman Reedus’ character from The Walking Dead whose name I don’t remember).

The best moments of both Day and Dawn are the tender, quiet ones: in DAY when we visit John and Bill’s homey RV apartment (complete with faux-backyard), in DAWN when we observe our protagonists just spending time shopping and relaxing in the mall much as they would have done before the end of the world. 

Their relationships are also relatable and not defined solely by their predicament. In DAWN, for example, we learn that Francine is pregnant but the tension of that pregnancy isn’t directly tied to the zombie apocalypse, but rather to her growing concern that the father of the child may be a reckless fool. Who can’t relate to that?

Compare this to Zack Snyder’s remake of DAWN which also features a pregnancy but one which ends with the zombified baby ostensibly eating its way out of its mother’s womb. That’s certainly a bit of grisly fun, but it’s a telling example of how some of the subtlest and strongest elements of Romero’s films are largely ignored for flashier and usually cheaper titillations.

But who cares, right? What matters with films like these is being scared, being grossed out. But Romero’s films succeed wildly at that too. The final scenes of this film are, to me, incredibly disturbing: a long, well-lit and unflinching orgy of cannibalistic savagery made all the more upsetting by how near it borders on the cartoonish.

I obviously left a great deal of this film undiscussed, but overall I was excited by this revisit, and more than anything pleased to discover that these films aren’t still in the conversation solely because they started a genre. It’s because they’re still far and away the best of that genre.

I’m still mostly tired of zombie fiction, but now on the rare occasion when I have a hankering I know I can turn to Romero’s films for a healthy meal. All that other gristle and slop filling up streaming services? They’re out there if you’re hungry enough. Just make sure you don’t do what DAY OF THE DEAD’s Captain Henry Rhodes suggests in his final moments:

“CHOKE ON ‘EM! CHOKE ON ‘EM!”

———
Adam Szym is a Stoker Award nominated cartoonist based in Brooklyn, New York. He makes scifi and horror comics, and you can buy his books here: https://adamszym.bigcartel.com/

Sisters (1972) - dir. Brian De Palma
I really liked it! Especially interesting to me was how much of Sisters’ style is apparent in more modern horror movies, but I guess the whole thing of the horror of medical anomalies has been a long-standing thing. Fun to see this early version of De Palma’s fascination with voyeurism and Hitchcock as well. I loved our plucky lady reporter gettin’ the scoop! Each new development was pretty well telegraphed, but it still managed to be shocking — that whole long stretch of flashbacks to the past was genuinely nightmarish and unsettling, and stylistically it reminded me a little bit of the dreams from 8 1/2.

Freaks (1932) - dir. Tod Browning
Not what I was expecting, but it really won me over by the end. Surprising that most of this movie feels like a kind of bizarre slice of life movie (I kept thinking about what Richard Linklater’s Freaks might have looked like, but now that I’m thinking about it, Freaks seems like it’d be more of a Todd Solondz thing), but once the plot kicks in it takes kind of a mean turn towards ironic justice and punishment which I loved. The scene where our titular freaks are chasing down the now bloodied circus strongman Hercules was such a menacing image. Pretty raw stuff!

Salem’s Lot (1979) - dir. Tobe Hooper
I didn’t know that this was originally a TV miniseries, but I’m counting it here anyway. It really should have just been an hour and a half-ish movie. There are some fun bits in here though. I got a kick out of the townspeople’s distrust and growing suspicion of the clearly gay-coded villain, but there’s just way too much bloat in here.

Watcher (2022) - dir. Chloe Okuno
I thought the trailer for this seemed so scary and weird, but it kind of ends up being more straightforward than I would have liked. Honestly I was sort of hoping for something more along the lines of Resurrection (2022), a movie that really threw me for a loop with its slow burn turning a typical thriller premise into something completely bizarre and gross and unnerving. Watcher suffers a bit from its insistence on its message (BELIEVE WOMEN), but I don’t think it’s as heavy handed as something like The Babadook, which I kind of hold in my mind as the most egregious offender of a horror movie nakedly pointing out what its metaphor is about. I think Watcher did an ok job of putting its message out there, but maybe it was my fault for hoping a modern horror movie would focus less on its messaging and more on being scary for once.

The Omen (1976) - dir. Richard Donner
Not a first watch, but I love this movie about this bad little boy. Every time I watch this I feel like I have a new favorite part, and this time it was when all the baboons at the drive thru safari are going apeshit when Damien comes thru. Animals are always the first to know!

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) - dir. Rouben Mamoulian
I really couldn’t believe how hard this movie goes. First off, those transformations done with practical effects and makeup and lighting. I don’t know how any of this works, so I was mesmerized! (George explained to me that it has to do with the different makeup features on Jekyll’s face being revealed under different lighting setups that become unnoticeable since the film is black and white, which I think is so cool, thanks George!) The movie just keeps on rolling, and Mr. Hyde is a genuinely shocking character. It starts out like kind of a fun and campy thrill to see him in this sort of exaggerated ape-like makeup, but then you spend more time with this character and it’s shocking just how straight up evil he is — what he inflicts on Ivy is pretty vile! They really make Hyde as reprehensible as possible and you just can’t turn away!

Ginger Snaps (2000) - dir. John Fawcett
Absolutely loved this! Extremely brutal and pretty funny, and also very Canadian in a way that I’ve always really liked (let me elaborate for a sec: I know this is very USA-centric, but I like when a Canadian movie feels like it’s trying to go for an “any town, USA” vibe but it ends up landing on “Bizarro America where a couple of things just seem... wrong…” I think Cronenberg’s older movies land here as well as Degrassi). The body horror stuff is kind of shocking and funny before it becomes disgusting, which is really kind of the ideal trajectory of body horror for me. Ginger Snaps is a movie where the allegory about the horrors of being a teenage girl easily complements the werewolf horror material, to the point where I was left thinking that it’s pretty nuts that anyone ever thought a werewolf should be anything but an angry teenage girl.

Eyes Without A Face (1960) - dir. Georges Franju
That iconic mask really is horrifying! I had a great time watching this, but man do I hate watching surgery! (ATTN: My enemies, please do not read this next part) I’m really squeamish about watching someone get cut into and there’s a pretty extensive scene at the center of this movie that features exactly that, which is great. During that bit I did that thing where you kind of turn your head down and away but you’re still sort of watching out of your peripheral vision, which is my preferred way to keep watching when I don’t want to watch; very effective tactic if you’re being a big fucking baby, definitely recommend it. Disgusting as all that surgery stuff was, I had to laugh at how… uh… cavalier our awful doctor was with the surgery. He and his assistant are just sort of arbitrarily clipping points on this woman’s face, our guy is just straight up freehanding the drawn on lines to guide his blade when he’s cutting her up, then when he pulls out the scalpel he’s not even cutting along the lines. It’s so funny and gross, and I think I loved that so much because it’s just so interesting that there was a time in movies when they were just sort of fudging it with the medical stuff instead of writing in a bunch of official sounding medical jargon and like bringing in medical consultants to tell them that actually real surgeons don’t just sort of cut wherever.

Donnie Darko (2001) - dir. Richard Kelly
Not a first watch, and I’m not even sure this counts as a horror movie, but it was in the Criterion Channel’s High School Horror collection, so I’m just gonna put it here. If anything I guess you can count it as a Halloween movie at least. Every time I watch this, I am shocked that people used to talk about how this movie made no sense. The movie tells you exactly what it’s doing and exactly what’s happening! Also don’t ever watch this movie with me because it was shot at my high school and I will not shut up about where my locker is and which teachers’ classrooms are in here. It’s really fucking annoying and I simply won’t stop doing it.

Flesh For Frankenstein (1973) - dir. Paul Morrissey
Wrote about this one for the previous MOVIE DIARY 2023.

The Empty Man (2020) - dir. David Prior
Kind of a frustrating one for me I think. There was a bunch of stuff in here that I was feeling, but every time there was a cool thing happening it almost immediately gets followed up by something so stupid that just sort of immediately negated the cool thing that just happened. The concept is fun and sort of Lovecraftian without being annoying, and I did enjoy the kind of twists and turns in scope, but moment to moment it just felt so start and stop to me. I will say that the narrative reasoning around why our main guy is your typical grieving father alcoholic detective type was kind of funny and clever, even if it did feel like the filmmakers were kind of covering their own asses a little bit.

Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988) - dir. Tony Randel
Very funny how they just made a sort of typical sequel to the movie about intergalactic sex tourists. It sort of takes the beats of Hellraiser and just makes them bigger like a lot of lazy sequels of the time would do, but I don’t know that I would call this lazy. It’s really fucking disgusting and gory, then when it fully moves into the hell dimension it really takes off into the phantasmagoric, which is a lot of fun for a little bit before it sort of turns into this kind of stupid superhero fight of Pinhead versus whatever the new Cenobite is called. I did like the reveal near the end of it where you find out that all the Cenobites were people once. Although I don’t know, is that actually a reveal? I guess I sort of just assumed that was the case, but maybe people were assuming they were aliens or something? Either way a fun bit where the new Cenobite is knocking the other Cenobites around, literally slapping the Cenobite out of them and reverting them to their human forms, though I don’t really want to think about the implications of that toothy Cenobite being revealed as just some little kid.

You’re Next (2011) - dir. Adam Wingard
Not a first watch, but it’d been a while since I’d seen this one, and I gotta say this is still such a hoot. Perfect horror movie to scream along too. A lot of fun, a couple of very gross kills, and the joke of the family being played a bunch of mumblecore directors is really funny. It’s cool that Adam Wingard only did this and The Guest and he never directed another movie again and in fact his career ended on the high note of making two perfect horror-adjacent movies. Now to take a sip of my coffee and check his IMDB page…

Psycho (1998) - dir. Gus Van Sant
Not a first watch. Obviously not as good as the original Psycho (1960), but you really gotta hand it to Gus Van Sant for being foolhardy enough to conceive of trying this, and you also have to shout out the movie industry of the late 90s for being in a place where this sort of self-indulgent experimentalism was seen as a financially viable project. Very weird that this exists, but ultimately I guess I’m glad that there was once a time when Gus Van Sant was like “Hey I wanna do a shot for shot remake of Psycho, you know, just to see what happens,” and movie execs were like “Yeah sure, here’s some money for you.”

X (2022) - dir. Ti West
Pearl (2022) - dir. Ti West
Gonna write about these two together since they’re sort of companion pieces to each other. I did not really care for either of these movies. There’s a few things to like about each of them, sure — I liked what Kid Cudi was doing in X, I liked that Pearl was really just a vehicle for Mia Goth to go full sicko mode — but as a whole I found both of these movies to be pretty tedious. Honestly the character stuff in both of these movies is totally fine, but once we move into the slasher territory, I just started losing interest. On top of that Pearl is so annoyingly obvious about how it’s also about isolation during COVID-19. I guess if I had to pick between the two, I think Pearl is the stronger of the two, and I think that that’s because it was more character study than it was slasher (although there’s plenty of slasher in it), and I think it’s usually interesting to see whatever insane shit Mia Goth is up to. Mia Goth’s psychotic smile over the end credits of Pearl was hands down the best part.

Suspiria (1977) - dir. Dario Argento
Not a first watch. This movie is such a perfect vibes-based horror movie. There are parts of it that still don’t make a whole lot of sense to me, particularly the physical layout of the school, but none of that is really important. It’s such a stylish movie, you can’t help but be drawn to its brilliant technicolor colors (if I’m remembering correctly it was the last film shot in technicolor?) and its shocking violence. Plus the Goblin soundtrack! I don’t know, I have nothing new to say about this movie, it just rocks.

Targets (1968) - dir. Peter Bogdanovich
Half of it is an interesting look at an actor at the end of his career, aptly played by an aging Boris Karloff. The other half of it is this really compelling look at this veteran with a typical suburban life coming mentally undone and giving into his violent urges. The two are on an improbably collision course, and it’s legitimately one of the best movies I’ve seen this year. Not really sure if it’s horror in the “Halloween horror” sense (I mean Boris Karloff is in it, so there’s a little connection there), but it’s certainly horrifying. I don’t have the stomach to write about the epidemic of mass shootings in America, but I will say that it’s very interesting to see the fear of mass shootings so vividly portrayed in a movie from 1968. Seeing Bobby back from serving overseas and living with his parents and his wife in a cheerful suburban neighborhood, it’s unsettling seeing the signs that something is off about him. And not just how he looks like a wholesome Richie Cunnignham-type and how he calls his father “sir” (which is always a red flag). What’s really heartbreaking is the one scene where Bobby is trying to ask for help and trying to talk to his wife about what’s been going on in his head, but he just doesn’t know how to talk about it. From there the nightmare starts with him casually killing his wife and his mother, and it barrels onward to a killing spree at the drive-in theater. The final scenes where pandemonium erupts at the drive-in while Bobby coldly uses a sniper rifle to shoot into the cars are truly terrifying, the mass rush of bodies and cars heading for the one exit feels like such a nightmare.

Unfriended (2014) - dir. Levan Gabriadze
Not a first watch. I love this stupid fucking movie, sorry. Kept thinking about this classic Tyler, The Creator tweet while watching it this time:

Near Dark (1987) - dir. Kathryn Bigelow
Not a first watch. I remember when I watched this for the first time, I wasn’t super hot on it, but this time everything about it just clicked for me and now I love it. It’s kind of funny how this movie is sort of just Kathryn Bigelow revisiting The Loveless (1981) (except it’s with vampires this time) but Bigelow is pretty great at doing a cool outlaw story. She just knows how to do a story where some guy is just sucked into the orbit of dangerous cool guys!

House of Usher (1960) - dir. Roger Corman
Unfortunately I took a little snooze during a big chunk of the middle of this, but I was enjoying what I was awake for! For my money the best Roger Corman/Vincent Price movie is The Masque of the Red Death (1964).

Cobweb (2023) - dir. Samuel Bodin
Look, this was not a great movie, but it absolutely scratched an itch that I’d been feeling for this entire Halloween season. I’d been wanting to watch a modern horror movie that’s scary, a little violent and/or gross, a little schlocky, and that isn’t about trauma or whatever. Cobweb fit all of these criteria, and I had a great time watching it. Lizzy Caplan is in it, and she’s doing a weird performance, which I think is supposed to be a riff on Piper Laurie in Carrie (1976). I’m not sure it’s working that way, but it’s kind of bizarre to watch in a really fun way. That guy who plays Homelander in The Boys is also in it, and I just love that actor. He’s so good at playing condescending and scary. The story takes a bit to ramp up, and when it does it’s sort of predictable, but there are a lot of fun scares along the way and some pretty creepy effects. Sometimes “good enough” is all you need!

Dracula (1931) (Spanish language version) - dir. George Melford
George Melford’s Spanish Dracula film uses the same sets (and I think some of the same shots) from Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931). Browning’s was shot during the day, and Melford’s was shot at night. It’s a really interesting piece of film history that is also just a solid Dracula movie. Neither the English or the Spanish version is really my favorite Dracula movie (I always have to go with Coppola’s), but I think they’re both really fun. The guy who plays Renfield in the Spanish version is incredible, just really bulldozing his way through the movie, screaming fully unhinged shit at everyone. I also loved how they worked with Eva (the Spanish counterpart to Mina Harker) coming under the spell of Conde Dracula. Also an interesting take on Van Helsing here, and it’s really funny to see that the Spanish version (and really almost every version of Dracula) still treats Juan Harker (Spanish Jonathan Harker) as a total drip.

Thirteen Women (1932) - dir. George Archainbaud
As I’ve stressed before, MOVIE DIARY 2023 is not a horny blog, BUT if Myrna Loy had a vendetta against me, I would simply let her kill me. I had a great time watching this one. A little bit racist, but that sort of comes with the territory in this era of films. The premise of it — Myrna Loy decides to get revenge on the girls who outed her at finishing school by fucking with their horoscopes and manipulating them into killing themselves or driving themselves crazy — feels pretty modern, and Tessa and I were joking that they should just remake this with the cast of Bottoms (2023). I don’t know, it could work! Thirteen Women is super fun. Myrna Loy is an amazing femme fatale type, and there’s a great sense of tension here that ends up with some really fun kills and some harrowing attempted murders. There’s an atmosphere of menace throughout this movie, and Myrna Loy with her sharp gaze and her insane dresses becomes the embodiment of malice whenever she steps onscreen. This is a movie about how everyone says they want a hot goth girlfriend until that hot goth girlfriend starts enacting her plan to get revenge on her enemies from college.

The third part of the blog, where I plug the MOVIE DIARY 2023 Discord

Man, that was a lot of writing, I don’t know what else I’ve got to say here. Happy Halloween! Pop into the Discord and let’s talk about horror movies, I always love recommendations. Plus, you can still watch horror movies in November, you’re allowed to watch them whenever, you make the rules of your life.

Next week I’ll talk about the big movies in the theaters now, your Killers of the Flower Moon, your The Killer, maybe Priscilla, what have you…