Is It Scary Season Already? Here are Some Movies for Your Week 1 Movie Marathon.

---

None of my content is behind a paywall, but if you want to support me please consider being a paid subscriber or heading over to Buy Me a Coffee to Buy Me a Book.

---

Earlier today I was on my break and decided to update my Letterboxd profile with a couple of movies I watched recently and I noticed that Joe Russo (horror movie Joe Russo not Marvel Joe Russo) had created a Scary Season viewing list and had already entered his first viewing of the Season. I immediately entered that liminal state of uncertainty where I was simultaneously experiencing the joys of summer while wondering if I should be engaging in Scary Season viewing. Enjoying horror films as much as I do, which on a scale of 1 to

Rebekah King

at John Landis level, I decided it was time to do a movie marathon and follow that up with weekly lists of films I think are worth watching. I’ll have to try to make sure that I keep logging the films on Letterboxd. I am woefully behind on that site and haven’t entered nearly all the films I’ve seen.

At the end of this weekly recommendation process, I’ll create a couple of Geekshelves based on these choices which center on specific subgenres within horror. For example, there will be Geekshelves for Witch films, Werewolf movies, Vampire flicks, Gothic Horror, Slasher films etc. I figure I’ll get a good four to eight lists out of this process because thinking about great horror movies, and there are a lot of them, inspires thinking about more horror movies. To make things easy, and because these are films I watch pretty much every year, I’ll start with films I recommended at the end of Scary Season last year, but I’ll add a few more to make reading this post worth your time.

Scary Season Marathon Week 1

I’m a huge fan of British horror films produced during the “Hammer Era,” so I’ll be making a couple of my recommendations along that theme. In part because the 1950s - 1970s were overlooked by my fellow contributors and in part because Hammer wasn’t the only studio making great horror films at the time. I’ll start with one that blew me away when I first saw it.

Nothing But the Night (1973)

Christopher Lee has starred in at least three iconic roles across many generations. For the Baby Boomers, he will always be known as Dracula, but he was also Saruman and Count Dooku. If you read up on his life, he’s definitely in the running for the most interesting man in the world during his lifetime. While he did a lot of work with Hammer Studios, he and fellow Hammer alum Anthony Nelson Keys teamed up to create Charlemagne Films where they produced one and only one film Nothing but the Night.

Nothing but the Night is an interesting horror film that touches on the fear of death that we all have and combines it with a bit of intergenerational hatred. Where Children of the Corn and The Children contained explicit “the kids are dangerous” messages, Nothing but the Night turns that on its head a bit. Given that there is a mystery at the core of the story, I will offer only one spoiler. The film was partially an inspiration for Get Out. The terror is different here, but…

The Asphyx (1973)

The Asphyx, ah, The Asphyx. I have such fond memories of this film. When I was a child I used to spend the night at my Oma and Opa’s house every other weekend. My Opa was a HUGE fan of genre fiction of all kinds and he introduced me to Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and The Asphyx.

Like Nothing but the Night, this film has as its central theme the battle against mortality, but in this case asks the question “what if we could kill (or at least capture) death and thus live forever?” What are the costs of such a life and is it worth living? The movie is wonderfully weird and while it was made in the 1970s, it perfectly captures the Victorian tone in both imagery and narrative. If you’re running a Victorian, or even modern, horror role playing game session for Halloween, this film is rich with ideas to inspire you.

The Beast Must Die (1974)

What do you get when you combine The Most Dangerous Game, The Wolfman, and the classic Cozy Mansion Mystery? The Beast Must Die is what you get. Amicus Productions, a competitor of Hammer Studios, produced this one and it is a tone of fun.

Millionaire Tom Newcliffe is a monster hunter who has invited a group of people to his home in order to reveal that one of them is a werewolf who must be killed. The mystery portion of the film is directed in much the same manner as a typical Agatha Christie tale and includes a famous “Werewolf Break” where the film is paused so that viewers can make their final guess regarding which guest bears the curse of lycanthropy. It’s a ton of fun and you can see echoes of its influence in films like Ready or Not and Werewolf by Night as well as other mansion murder mayhem films. Calvin Lockhart is wonderful as Tom Newcliffe and is my personal mental model for Blade the Vampire Hunter. He’s cool, calm, collected, and on the prowl to kill a werewolf.

Day of the Triffids (1963)

John Wyndham’s 1951 novel Day of the Triffids is a classic science fiction tale that has vast influence in both the science fiction and horror genre. Like many horrific science fiction stories, this film catalogs how the world shifts after an apocalyptic event and the decline of civilization is as much the story as the actual monsters. People are, as they say, the real monsters. You can see echoes of Day of the Triffids in 28 Days Later, It Comes at Night, The Walking Dead, Bird Box, and The Quiet Place. If the apocalyptic story is more about how society changes than it is about jump scares, it’s been inspired by Wyndham’s tale. In the cases of 28 Days Later, Bird Box, and The Quiet Place the connection is pretty explicit.

You’re Next (2011)

I have Luke to thank for this one. I’m not typically a big fan of home invasion horror, but based on Luke’s review on the Topless Robot site in 2013 I gave it a try. From relatively early in the film, I was riveted. It began in typical home invasion horror fashion and I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel, but then something happened that I didn’t expect. Sharni Vinson’s character Erin “realized she was in a horror movie” and acted accordingly.

It’s a frequent critique of scary movies that the protagonists act in ways that are foolish given the circumstances they are in. There’s many a stand up routine based on the “why did they walk down the dark stairs” joke. Those routines tend to miss the point. The characters in a horror film don’t know they are in a horror film and behave just like you and I would in “normal” circumstances. I often joke that the Winchester’s superpower in Supernatural was that they always knew they were in a horror story. Knowing gives you power and Erin has that power.

Watching her efficiently react to the dangerous circumstances transformed my viewing experience. I wasn’t watching Last House on the Left where the vulnerable manage to get some semblance of revenge, I was watching Rambo except her name was Erin Tiger, Sheep, and Wolf had no idea what they were getting into and it was a really fun ride. Sharni Vinson has had a bit of a career after You’re Next, but nowhere near the career I think she deserves. She is a talented actress and is my all-time favorite “Final Girl.”

Burn, Witch, Burn (1963)

I’m a huge fan of Fritz Leiber. After my introduction to fantasy fiction via Michael Moorcock, Leiber was my transition from deconstructive Sword & Sorcery into Sword & Sorcery proper. His Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories are among my favorite tales, but Leiber’s writing extended beyond the narrow confines of Sword & Sorcery and into literary horror. His novel, Conjure Wife, is among my favorite modern urban fantasy tales. It tells the story of a University Professor and his wife, a story that pre-sages David Mamet’s play Oleanna with regards to campus politics and the lives of professors and which pre-sages Bewitched with the use of a supernatural wife. Like Bell, Book, and Candle this is a tale of a witch in love, but unlike that light hearted story this is one with dark undertones.

The film stars Peter Wyngarde as Norman Taylor, the naive university professor who is about to have his entire world disrupted. You may remember Peter Wyngarde as the actor who played sexy spy Jason King of Department S in two ITV series or as Klytus in Flash Gordon. He’s magnificent here. He manages to be sexy and charming while also seeming distant and academic. Janet Blair plays his wife, who begins innocent and complies with his requests, but in the end shows a ruthlessness in defending her family that hints at Leiber’s (and the film maker’s) critique of early 1960s patriarchy. It’s a fun film and a very different from the other tales that inspired Bewitched. As much as I like I Married a Witch (which is good enough to have a Criterion edition) and Bell, Book, and Candle it’s Burn, Witch, Burn that I make sure to watch every year.

The Seventh Victim

Over the course of the Scary Season, I’ll be watching pretty much every film produced by Val Lewton. The films he produced are among the most influential horror films ever created. Even though Val Lewton worked with a number of different directors, all the films in his producer catalog have a look to them. The masterful use of shadow creates chiaroscuro imagery that brings to mind German Expressionism, but there is also a soft humanity to the films similar to Hitchcock’s British productions.

Val Lewton’s B-Films are A-Film quality film making with B-Film budgets. From the narratives to the acting to the cinematography there is an artistry in the films. A large reason for the beauty of the films is the fact that he worked with a stable of talented directors. Cat People, a film I will be highlighting later, was directed by Jacques Tourneur who would go on to direct a number of excellent B-Movies including personal favorites Night of the Demon and War-Gods of the Deep. Tourneur’s work was primarily devoted to B-Movies and genre films (though it includes a director’s credit for the very cool television show T.H.E. Cat), but his work is consistently entertaining.

Another of Lewton’s directors, Robert Wise who directed The Curse of the Cat People (after replacing Gunther von Fitsch who was running behind schedule and The Body Snatcher) would go on to become one of the great Hollywood directors. His credits include The Sound of Music, West Side Story, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Haunting, The Andromeda Strain, and many many more. Wise would go on to win 4 Academy Awards in his career (two for best director and two for best picture) and work on numerous nominated films, but he never stopped making genre films. Star Trek: The Motion Picture is one of Wise’s last films, but for all that some criticize it the film is a masterpiece of visual engagement. It’s a bit long, but that length is beautiful and the performances (in a really weird plot) are very good.

The Seventh Victim is directed by Mark Robson, who was Robert Wise’s assistant editor on Citizen Kane, and who would work on a number of Lewton projects before being promoted to director where he worked on both The Seventh Victim and The Ghost Ship (which I might have to include in an “Thematically Orthogonal Christmas Geekshelf”). Robson has a great sense of pace and an ability to capture the sinister. The Seventh Victim is a masterpiece of its genre and feels like a mashup of Hitchcock’s The 39-Steps and Rosemary’s Baby. Certainly, there are scenes that influenced Hitchcock’s Psycho and it can be seen as a kind of spiritual prequel to Rosemary’s Baby. Both The Seventh Victim and Rosemary’s Baby will certainly be on any Satanic Cult film Geekshelf list I create. They are central films in the genre.

Concluding Thoughts

This first list focuses pretty heavily on films from the 1960s and 1970s, and not enough time in earlier eras, but there is often too much presentism in the horror films we recommend. I tried to reach outside the “movies you are supposed to like” list and into some real personal favorites, favorites that had a legacy but personal favorites none the less. Some of the films are on the supposed to like lists, but they are also just great films.

What are some of your favorite horror movies?