If it weren’t for the fact that PROM NIGHT featured a post-HALLOWEEN Jamie Lee Curtis, I highly doubt it’d be remembered much at all today. While it’s a serviceable slasher and does what it says on the tin — a whole bunch of students are stalked and killed in their high school on prom night — it does get lost a bit in the deluge of 1980s slashers.
Now, HELLO MARY LOU: PROM NIGHT II? There’s a film that stands out!
I’ll grant you: HELLO MARY LOU was never slated to be a PROM NIGHT sequel, but it featured a prom queen and murder so the studio appended PROM NIGHT II to the title and that was that.
Unlike PROM NIGHT, HELLO MARY LOU is far more supernatural, focused on the death of a 50s prom queen who, let loose in suburban 1987, inhabits bodies to reclaim her crown by any means necessary.
The result is smart and silly, and has inventively surreal set-pieces that rack up the bodies. Oh, and Michael Ironside is a priest! That’s worth the price of admission alone.
HELLO MARY LOU was followed by PROM NIGHT III, which veers into full supernatural slapstick, but I’ve already featured it! Find a copy of both any way that you can!
If you’re in Chicago on October 18th, 2024? HELLO MARY LOU is playing at the Music Box Theatre and features writer Ron Oliver! It promises to be a night to remember!
French arthouse director Claire Denis’s TROUBLE EVERY DAY is a difficult film to classify, to the point where some misguided souls would argue that it’s not a horror film at all. It is enigmatically subdued but violent. Overt and obtuse. Visually lyrical and strikingly blunt to the eyes. Thick with lust and rarely erotic. Alludes to vampirism but is grounded by human faults.
It’s about feeding bloody need, addiction, restriction, seeking and rejecting assistance, and all of the baggage that comes with all of the above.
It is also a highly unpleasant 101 minutes long that culminates in an act that is incredibly difficult to watch. So much so that more than a handful of folks walked out of the screening I attended.
It is considered part of the New French Extremity for a reason. (Also, it does feature INSIDE’s very feral Béatrice Dalle.)
It’s a film that kept stealing my attention for well over a week, its provocations and intent seeping into me, questions and speculations bubbling out. That may seem overwrought and pretentious, but Denis elicited that from me.
SISSY, from writer/directors Hannah Barlow and Kane Senes, is a vivid horror subversion of the ‘reuniting with childhood friends’ genre. Cecilia, a.k.a. Sissy (THE BOLD TYPE’s Aisha Dee) is a self-care influencer who displays the veneer of a calm, crisp, clean and put-together 20-something, but instead lives for the glow of her phone while falling asleep eating day-old room temperature pizza.
While out-and-about, Cecilia runs into estranged childhood best friend Emma (Hannah Barlow) and the two quickly reconnect. Emma invites Sissy to her very queer bachelorette party in a posh vacation home nestled in Australian woodland. Unbeknown to Cecilia, her childhood nemesis Alex is hosting said hen party. Tensions build, matters escalate, bonds and bones are broken and blood is spilled.
I’ll refrain from saying much more as it’s a wild ride, and best to only know the above. That won’t keep me for noting that, visually, SISSY is yet another in a line of refreshingly vibrant and colorful horror films. A large chunk of the film takes place in daylight, when the sun falls the frame is peppered with pastel neon glows. That may seem antithetical to a woodland-based horror/thriller, but it works.
There are also a number of small little grace notes that I love. One of the party members pouring a glass of a wine from a carafe and — without any sense of shame or self-consciousness — licks the trailing remainder from the lip of the carafe! There’s a playful nod towards slashers and face masks!
Lastly, I’ll note that SISSY was Autostraddle’s Queer Horrorscope Film pick for Cancers, so apparently I was pre-ordained to watch it this month. Perhaps a gripping tale about self-justifying self-destructive self-delusion isn’t exactly the kind of messaging one wants to hear from their filmic horrorscope, but it is very on-brand.
Classic Troma films are cheap and fun gross-out affairs by misfits, for misfits, and CLASS OF NUKE ‘EM HIGH is no exception.
The premise is paper thin: Tromaville High School — a typical 80s high school with jocks and nerds and a clutch of cartoonishly costumed gang members named ‘The Cretins’ — is situated next to a nuclear facility.
An accident occurs at the plant and nuclear waste spills into high school. Mutations ensue! An atomic baby-monster is birthed! The Cretins graduate from traditional bullying, drug dealing and deviant behavior to ultra-violent and psychotic behavior! Boyfriend and girlfriend Warren and Chrissy try to survive! Students cheer the shutdown of the school!
It’s a wild time, featuring all of the colorful camp and good-natured buckets of bodily fluids that you’d expect from Lloyd Kaufman’s scrappy DYI studio that brought you THE TOXIC AVENGER.
The Cretins are ostensibly the film’s villains as it’s the nuclear weed that they peddle that is the catalyst for the film’s mayhem, they punch down literally and figuratively, and their makeup and costumes are garish at best and culturally offensive at worse. However, they’re also a warm representation of smart-but-willful societal dropouts.
See, before they were The Cretins they were Tromaville High’s honor students. Now? Now they’re a whirlwind of disrespectful and abnormal behavior with no tolerance for conventional norms, ready to upend the system in every way they can. Body paint, fetish gear, severe piercings and gender fuckery! They’re society’s gremlins and damn proud of it!
I will note that the reason why these honor students became The Cretins is somewhat unclear. I like to think of them as having voluntarily checked out of normative culture and into fringe subcultures, much like myself as a teen.
Do they commit terrible acts, acts that damn them to gruesome deaths? Yeah, sure. Do we still root for them? Well, I certainly took glee in doing so. That’s because, well, at heart? I’m a dirtbag cretin.
To those in the goth community, Elvira — a.k.a. Cassandra Petersen — is a living legend as a not just a TV horror film host, but also as a singular personality. (Unfortunately, her predecessor Maila Nurmi was not a fan.) A lot of folks believe being goth is all doom and gloom and feeling sad for themselves and the world and, while that’s part of the subculture, there’s a lot of whimsy and a fuckton of self-awareness and comfort with one’s body and sexuality.
In other words: Elvira knows who she is, what she wants, she doesn’t feel the need to filter herself and, as a result, she’s completely content with being brazen and someone who unapologetically revels in the darker facets of humanity, while also leaning into her love for vaudeville humor.
“Oh, fragility. Thy name is woman.”
While you might think that ELVIRA’S HAUNTED HILLS is a sequel to her cult film ELVIRA: MISTRESS OF THE DARK, it most certainly is not. It takes place in 1851 and riffs on a lot of traditional gothic works — there’s a lot of DRACULA here — but more than anything it’s a love letter to Roger Corman’s very loosely adapted films based on Edgar Allen Poe stories.
“That’s really weird. Cross-dressers are usually great dancers.”
(I’ll note that Lord Vladimere Hellsubus is portrayed by the one and only Richard O’Brien, best known for THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW’s Riff Raff.)
During the sixties, Corman warped a number of Poe works into films, including his version of THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER, THE RAVEN, and THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM, all of which ELVIRA’S HAUNTED HILLS riffs on, even down to mimicking the production design of Corman’s THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM.
While ELVIRA’S HAUNTED HILLS leans quite a bit on Corman’s works, it’s still singularly hers. It’s brazenly cartoonish, and she’s certainly the star. From her making the most of her cleavage to also being the smartest and funniest person in the room, she’s also not even close to shy. This is best exemplified by her repeated attempts to woo Adrian, Gabi Andronache recreating a vapid Fabio, all shoulder-length brunette curls and buff chest.
“Adrian! You came too late! …again.”
Additionally, she gets her own CABARET-esque musical number which ends with her brandishing underwear that literally begs for applause.
Even if you aren’t part of the goth community, this is one hell of a lark, one that is very self-aware and doesn’t take itself seriously but is also very smart and knowing. I do wish she’d been able to turn out yearly films because she’s so fun and charismatic while also being an absolute misfit and we need more of that in the world. However, I’m thankful we can watch the few films that she willed into the world.
This was a while ago, but I did take video art classes from PERPETRATOR director/writer Jennifer Reeder back in my college days. She wouldn’t know me from Adam now — I’m simply noting it out of a sense of responsibility. She’s a great teacher who now teaches at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and I will never forget screening my first extremely personal and intensely overworked short video piece in her class, which one fellow student exclaimed after viewing it: “That gave me a migraine.”
I also saw PERPETRATOR at the Chicago premiere, with a ton of the crew in the audience, as well as with a post-film Q&A between the always awesome Katie Rife and Reeder, so I can’t deny that the entire audience was completely on-board for what they were about to see.
I will try to keep this short and succinct for once, because this is one of those rare films that I feel requires a second viewing, but it’s rolling out on screens this week and I want to boost it!
Director/writer/auteur Jennifer Reeder loves genre conventions, but is also firmly ensconced in experimental works. Her prior feature — KNIVES AND SKIN — is very much about teen girls and high school and cliques and being pursued, but also embraces how these girls get to know their bodies and everything that entails, including how others view and abuse them, and she films all of this through a teen haze; events happen around and to you and they don’t often make sense, but you just roll with it because you don’t know any better. While it shares a lot of DNA from TWIN PEAKS, it is still its own thing.
PERPETRATOR follows in the same vein, but it’s far, far bloodier, far more disturbing, and features far more orifices than her prior film. It’s disturbing, certainly, but it does what I think horror does best: detailing the confusion of body and personality transformation but also how folks simply adjust and accept or reject it. While it is fundamentally a narrative genre feature, it is not afraid of diverging into more surreal and nebulous areas.
I know I’m not doing the film justice with this post. (I will circle back with a later post detailing the rest of the cast and crew!) Hell, I may even be misrepresenting it; it’s that kind of film. I’m a huge fan of her and still I went into this film knowing nothing about it and I’d suggest doing the same. It’s a shocking, provocative, singular film that feels like nothing else out there.
Nonetheless, here’s the trailer, and if you have a SHUDDER subscription, you can watch it there soon, or if you live in NYC or LA or Chicago, you can catch it on the big screen, which is really how you should see some of the puckering.
For over a decade, my wife and I have had a tradition where I draft up a selection of horror films for Halloween viewing, and she picks one from each group: contemporary, classic, and cult, and I thought I’d share my suggestions this year.
Due to timing and circumstances, I provided our contemporary first yesterday, and now it’s time for classic and cult. This is cult! I’m also including some personal notes to provide context.
A loosey-goosey adaptation of a mediocre Stephen King novel that’s stuck in my mind since I watched it many years ago, mostly because it’s extremely chaotic for King. It’s probably not quantifiably good, but it’s a lot of fun. Max von Sydow as the devil — what more could you want?!
“Proto-90s post-modern horror. I’d say SCREAM before Wes Craven’s SCREAM, but that infers that it’s a lesser film than SCREAM whereas I think it’s one of the smartest self-reflexive horror films ever made; it’s an author reckoning with the perils of creating a horror film franchise that spirals out of their control, while still being an absurdly entertaining, winking, surreal and horrifying film. Smartly shot and absolutely ruthlessly paced — every scene expertly blends into the next — it’s Wes Craven besting himself.
“A brilliant film, even if you haven’t seen prior NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET films, but so much better if you have.”
PROM NIGHT II: HELLO MARY LOU
The first PROM NIGHT is a pretty standard slasher, whereas PROM NIGHT II dodges into bonkers supernatural territory. It’s quite inventive — more like HELLRAISER — and lot of fun.
“MASSACRE was penned by Rita Mae Brown, a well-known feminist activist and writer, and Corman picked it up and gave it to Amy Holden Jones to direct, but only if she’d play it straight. It features wall-to-wall women, all more capable and unique than you’d normally see in a slasher film, and the film leans so heavily on the male gaze that it’s intentionally absurd, a sly way of gaining Corman’s approval while hoping others would recognize it as visually subversive.”
It’s a very smart, knowing, but also still fun, film which I find rare with slashers. You wouldn’t have SCREAM without it.
Trailer (warning: it’s very NSFW and gives everything away):
THE STRANGE COLOR OF YOUR BODY’S TEARS (2013):
“Returning home from a business trip to discover his wife missing, a man delves deeper and deeper into a surreal kaleidoscope of half-baked leads, seduction, deceit, and murder. Does anyone in the building know something?”
Throwback giallo from the filmmakers of one of my recent favorite films: LET THE CORPSES TAN. One of those films I’ve listed in the past, but haven’t watched for myself because it’s too visually demanding.
For over a decade, my wife and I have had a tradition where I draft up a selection of horror films for Halloween viewing, and she picks one from each group: contemporary, classic, and cult, and I thought I’d share my suggestions this year.
Due to timing and circumstances, I’m providing our contemporary first today, then classic and cult tomorrow. I will note that I have not seen all of the contemporary suggestions, but most of those that I have seen will have links to prior write-ups. I’m also including some personal notes to provide context.
“A young gymnast, who tries desperately to please her demanding mother, discovers a strange egg.”
Trailer, but I’d suggest passing on it as it gives a lot away:
THE DARK AND THE WICKED (2020)
“On a secluded farm, a man is bedridden and fighting through his final breaths while his wife slowly succumbs to overwhelming grief. Siblings Louise and Michael return home to help, but it doesn’t take long for them to see that something’s wrong with mom—something more than her heavy sorrow. Gradually, they begin to suffer a darkness similar to their mother’s, marked by waking nightmares and a growing sense that an evil entity is taking over their family.”
Been in my queue for a bit, but haven’t watched it yet.
THE LOVE WITCH (2016)
“A modern-day witch uses spells and magic to get men to fall in love with her, with deadly consequences.”
A delightfully colorful feminist work masquerading as a campy 70s throwback.
SLAXX (2021)
“A possessed pair of jeans is brought to life to punish the unscrupulous practices of a trendy clothing company. Shipped to the company’s flagship store, Slaxx proceeds to wreak carnage on staff locked in overnight to set up the new collection.”
I’ve been meaning to watch this campier version of IN FABRIC since it was released, but have yet to.
“A dark fairy tale about a gang of five children trying to survive the horrific violence of the cartels and the ghosts created every day by the drug war.”
That description makes it sound like a thriller, but it has more in common with THE COMPANY OF WOLVES.
“Merricat, Constance and their Uncle Julian live in isolation after experiencing a family tragedy six years earlier. When cousin Charles arrives to steal the family fortune, he also threatens a dark secret they’ve been hiding.”
A fine adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s final novel of the same name.
THE WOLF HOUSE (2018)
“Tells the story of Maria, a young woman who takes refuge in a house in southern Chile after escaping from a German colony.”
A stop-animation marvel that I’ve been meaning to watch for some time.
“While passing through a vacation resort, a newlywed couple encounters a mysterious, strikingly beautiful countess and her aide.”
A stylish, surreal cult queer vampire film, featuring the brilliant Delphine Seyrig. Very giallo, prioritizing sensation over plot, like most quality vampire films.
(Shudder/VOD) A post-apocalyptic vision from Academy Award winning visual effects expert Phil Tippett that was thirty years in the making. You can see that effort on the screen, in every absolutely filthy, disgusting stop-motion frame. Think: the Brothers Quay, but with far more bodily fluids.
MAD GOD harkens back to the days of the illustrated magazine and cult film HEAVY METAL. It’s wall-to-wall visual phantasmagoria, but the type that — while disturbing — also often inspires.
It’s utterly indescribable, often not-quite coherent; a complete marvel. It is not for everyone — especially for those who are squeamish or prefer their horror to not feel like an exquisite corpse experiment — but you will never see anything like it.
