Decades of Terror: Takoma's Slow-Moving October Time Machine

Happy (almost) October!

While I watch horror year-round, October can be a fun month to go all-in on the genre, plus the added bonus of more choices on many streaming services.

The premise of this thread is simple: starting with 2023, moving backwards through the years and seeing how far back in time I can go.

So chime in, sound off (respectfully), give me your hottest takes, and enjoy the ride!

2023: No One Will Save You
2022: Bones and All
2021: Saloum
2020: Relic
2019: La Llorona
2018: Summer of 84
2017: The Wild Boys
2016: Sweet Sweet Lonely Girl
2015: They Look Like People
2014: Lyle
2013: Witching and Bitching
2012: Simon Killer
2011: Choose
2010: A Horrible Way to Die
2009: Strigoi
2008: Repo: The Genetic Opera
2007: 28 Weeks Later
2006: Black Sheep
2005: Feast
2004: Shutter
2003: Puppet Master: The Legacy
2002: Malefique
2001: Wendigo
2000: Bruiser
1999: Wishmaster 2
1998: The Quiet Family
1997: The Killing Jar
1996: Leprechaun 4: In Space
1995: The Addiction
1994: Creatures from the Abyss
1993: When a Stranger Calls Back
1992: Demonic Toys
1991: The Boneyard
1990: Def by Temptation
1989: Warlock
1988: Death Spa
1987: Wolf's Hole
1986: Gothic
1985: After Darkness
1984: The Initiation
1983: Wilczyca
1982: Nightbeast
1981: X-Ray aka Hospital Massacre
1980: Fade to Black
1979: Don't Go in the House
1978: Beauty and the Beast
1977: Death Game
1976: The Town That Dreaded Sundown
1975: The Devil's Rain
1974: The Phantom of the Paradise
1973: Scream, Blacula, Scream!
1972: Silent Night, Bloody Night
1971: The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave
1970: Wizard of Gore
1969: Django the Bastard
1968: A Quiet Place in the Country
1967: The Torture Chamber of Dr Sadism
1966: Let's Kill Uncle
1965: Dr. Terror's House of Horrors

No One Will Save You, 2023

Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever) lives in a small town where she is an outcast for reasons related to the loss/absence of her mother and a childhood friend called Maude. Isolated in her home, Brynn finds herself suddenly battling a mysterious alien creature that invades her house. With no hope of rescue, Brynn fights for her life against her increasingly powerful adversary.

A stellar premise crashes up against uneven execution in this interesting sci-fi/horror.

It’s hard writing about a movie like this where there are so many things to praise and also so many things that were frustrating. It’s also challenging to talk about this film without including elements of its final act, but I’ll do my best to stay spoiler-free.

On the positive side, the film does a good job of establishing the stakes and isolation of its protagonist. Brynn is facing the double whammy of physical isolation and social isolation. And while being a pariah doesn’t mean that 911 would ignore you, by the time Brynn manages to find others, it becomes clear that her visitor is not on its own.

I’m not really into downer movies, but there was something really engaging about the fact that Brynn is just slowly being corralled. There’s no time spent with some twee mystery about who is being controlled by the aliens or whatever. Brynn has nowhere that she can turn and the more we learn about the aliens the more hopeless her situation seems. Every small victory against one of the creatures seems merely like a battle that is won in a war that will inevitably be lost.

I also liked some of the visuals that went along with the creatures and just in general. There are some nice shots and simple effects---such as Brynn being trapped frozen in a beam of red light--that have a lovely visual impact. I also loved when one of the creatures sat in a resting posture in the shape of a Y.

Finally, I thought that some of the actors did a really nice job with the physical acting side of their characters. One standout was Zack Duhame, who plays Brynn’s goober of a mailman who is one of the first people to be possessed/controlled by the creatures. His physical performance is very strong---apparently he’s mainly a stuntman---and I thought that his character was utilized to just the perfect degree.

Despite liking quite a few things about the movie---especially an idea that is floated in the final 15 minutes that I don’t discuss---there were also some things that just irked me while watching. At quite a few times, the effects were just too CGI for me. I get why CGI is used but boy does it ding my suspension of disbelief. And when certain choices are made in terms of the creatures’ movements (if you’ve seen the film, perhaps you remember a point where one of the creatures is, and there’s no other way to talk about it, voguing. Voguing the house down!), it just looks silly.

This is also the kind of film where the more you learn about what is actually happening, the less a lot of it makes any kind of sense. Maybe the writer had some behind-the-scenes logic about why this was taking place and what would happen after, but I just found myself thinking that the events of the film didn’t make a whole lot of sense in the big picture of things. So many sci-fi ideas are thrown out there that it becomes a bit incoherent, even with the framing that we’re locked into Brynn’s naive point of view.

Love the ideas here, but really mixed on how they were all put together.

Well, I spent the month of September binging most of the Halloween films and that was a wild ride. Still, I would say that franchise remains the most consistent out of the three "main" ones (Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street being the others).

__________________

BTW, I need to check out No One Will Save You. Looks like something I would enjoy.

It's one of those films that, while I was mixed on it, I think it deserves a decently wide audience. There is interest and originality there.

No One Will Save You has some extremely competent action/suspense direction and the pacing never lets up, great fun.

I felt it was let down by the too-obvious CGI of the creatures and also the fact that .

Just too many questions for my taste when it came to how the movie was using its mechanics.

Bones and All, 2022

Maren (Taylor Russell) is a young woman with an irrepressible desire to consume the flesh of other people. Shuffled from place to place by her father (Andre Holland), Maren wakes up one day to find that he has left her to navigate the world alone. With only some cash and her birth certificate on hand, Maren decides to make her way to Minnesota, where she hopes to find the mother she never knew. Along with way she finds that she’s not the only one of her kind. Meeting fellow “eater” Sully (Mark Rylance), Maren starts to learn the ropes. As she continues on her journey, she meets up with Lee (Timothee Chalamet), also afflicted with the insatiable hunger.

Trapped in largely unengaging space between straight-ahead horror and art-house allegory, a handful of promising scenes leave you wishing for what might have been.

To quote Folding Ideas host Dan Olsen, “Okay, so what . . . is this?”. There is a lot of great horror out there whose monsters and scenarios can easily be seen to double for all sorts of real-world terrors: addiction, infatuation, domestic violence, mental illness, etc. But while the construction of this film suggests a gesture at such an allegory, things just do not cohere in any kind of satisfying way.

There is some really good stuff scattered through the film. To begin with, I really liked Russell as the lead. She’s trying to navigate her own sense of survival and morality, and Russell does a good job of portraying someone who just keeps running up against versions of her life that she does not want. Chalamet is one of those actors who is very easily watchable. He’s got an understated charisma that’s well-suited to a character who largely doesn’t want to be noticed. Rylance walks a fine line between endearing and super-creepy as a man who keeps the hair of his victims in a long, braided rope that he carried in a satchel.

I also have to mention a scene in the film that, frankly, is an A+ as a short film within the larger movie around it. Maren and Lee end up around a campfire with two other Eaters, Jake (Michael Stuhlbarg) and Brad (David Gordon Green). In the flickering light, cracking cold beers, Jake tells the story of how he and Brad met. I’ll not reveal the details, but this scene on its own, right down to Maren’s last line in the scene, is brilliant.

As would be expected from director Luca Guadagnino, there are some really lovely shots and angles. Early on, Maren and a friend at a slumber party lay together beneath a glass-top coffee table. The sequence around the campfire is beautifully lit and eerie. While Maren is, herself, something of a monster, every setting in the film whether it’s a field or a mental hospital is leveraged quite well for tension.

But, seriously, what is this? There’s too much navel-gazing from the main characters for it to have the necessary clip and momentum of a straight-ahead horror film. And I am totally fine with horror that moves slow and build suspense, but this movie is all over the place. It’s riddled with half-hearted gestures at a theme.

In one scene, Maren and Lee sit in a barn where cattle are housed before slaughter. They muse about the fact that the cows have family and even friends. Okay, so is this a movie about being an ethical consumer? In other scenes, we learn things about Maren and Lee’s family that raise the idea of being an Eater as something hereditary. Okay, so is this a movie about patterns of violence/abuse/addiction being passed down through blood? Then, in the scene from which the title is taken, characters discuss cannibalism as being like a fulfilling act of sex or love. Okay, so is this a movie about emotions and the idea of love being a literally consuming thing?

If the movie had picked one idea and gone with it, I think you could have ended up with something visually and thematically interesting and engaging. But as it is, this is like a hodge-podge. I was genuinely baffled by the lack of nuance in a sequence where Maren is distraught after she and Lee eat a man who they did not realize had a family. But not once does Lee point out that a man who gleefully bullies children and has anonymous sex in the middle of the night with strange men is probably not the best husband and father.

I also always find myself incredibly annoyed when a movie makes it clear EXACTLY how it is going to end, and then gets there in a really contrived way. Some movies can telegraph their endings and still be brilliant, but that’s not the case here. At the climax of the film I felt no catharsis, just irritation.

Watchable, and worth watching for the campfire scene alone, but overall underwhelming.

Saloum, 2020

A trio of mercenaries known as the Hyenas---Chaka (Yann Gael), Rafa (Roger Sallah), and Minuit (Mentor Ba)--are attempting to land a big score by evacuating drug lord Felix (Renaud Farah) from the violence of a coup. But when their plane’s fuel tank springs a leak, they are forced to make an emergency landing. Chaka leads them to an isolated resort called Boabab, run by the cheerful Omar (Bruno Henry), where they can lie low and search for resources to fix the plane. But it soon becomes clear that there’s more to Boabab than meets the eye, and even the elite Hyenas may not be a match for what’s waiting out in the dark.

Incredibly engaging characters and a solid melding of real-world events and the supernatural carry this film through a rocky final act.

The likable band of criminals is a well-worn trope, and it’s even a well-worn trope within the horror genre. But darn if it isn’t an effective trope when done right.

The central trio in this film lands on the right side of the trope. Chaka is charismatic, but also clearly haunted and troubled. His extreme fear of water, introduced early in the film, implies that events at their beach destination won’t go all that well. Rafa is the muscle of the group, but at various points we see that he isn’t heartless. Minuit is straight-up some sort of sorcerer/magic man, and Mentor Ba is the kind of person whose striking looks do plenty of heavy lifting for the character. (Also, it is revealed relatively early on that all three men know sign language. This is one of those attributes of a character that is always both surprising and surprisingly appealing).

The source of the sign language reveal is another interesting character, a young woman named Awa (Evelyne Ily Juhen) who is both deaf and mute and quickly makes the men aware that she knows exactly who they are. While Awa at first seems like she’s been dropped into the film just to stir up a bit of trouble and serve as a maybe love interest for Chaka, Juhen brings great presence to her character. Henry is also good in his role as Omar. We all know that something isn’t right with Omar---far too cheerful! Never a good thing in a horror film!--but exactly what he’s up to is revealed slowly through the course of the film.

There are two streams of plot in this film, one of which is very “real world” and the other of which is supernatural. Something that’s interesting to me about this film is that the real world stuff is very compelling and you can see how the supernatural stuff could have simply been taken out and this would have remained a pretty good revenge thriller. I was a bit less engaged by the supernatural element, and I think it’s because the supernatural threat is more abstract than the very visceral threat represented by the events in Chaka’s past.

I don’t think that the last act here is the strongest, which is a shame. There are some really good, moving character moments. There are also some satisfying conclusions to a revenge arc that is tangentially related to the supernatural stuff. When it comes to the “big bad” of the film, I just felt that it lacked the personal connection of the other subplots. I’ll admit that some of this might be due to my lack of familiarity with some of the supernatural creatures/concepts at play. A lot of terms were being thrown around that I mostly didn’t recognize, and maybe if I had a stronger background, certain sequences would have made more sense to me.

This was a good recommendation, and I’d also recommend it.

Saloum has incredible Cowboy Bebop energy.

I really feel this part, when I watched it I also was a bit overwhelmed by everything thrown in at the end and wondering if there was some cultural information that would have helped explain it, so glad I'm not the only one that felt that way.

That being said I definitely agree that the characters and more grounded story elements more than carry the film to be very entertaining.

Ooh, you a fan of that show too?

Yes! Perfectly stated!

Yes---the last act only feels middling because what has come before it is so strong.

Relic, 2020

Edna (Robyn Nevin) is an elderly woman who mysteriously goes missing. Her daughter, Kay (Emily Mortimer), and granddaughter, Sam (Bella Heathcote), arrive to help search for her. Edna suddenly appears after three days, either unable or unwilling to say where she has been, and bearing a strange bruise on her chest. As Kay and Sam grapple and argue over what to do about Edna’s physical and mental decay, a strange mold takes over the home and strange dreams and noises haunt Kay and Sam.

Working from a nakedly allegorical position, this examination of the ravages of dementia via a horror lens is effective in its character work and some admirably upsetting scary set pieces.

Lots of horror movies--and lots of great horror movies!--have featured scenarios or monsters that were clearly meant as stand-ins for real-world villains or fears. In fact, I would say that some of my favorite horror movies feature stories that are really about the dehumanizing effects of addiction, or a fear of growing up.

But while I love a movie that pulls off this double act successfully (it’s a brain-eating parasite AND an allegory for drug addiction!), there has emerged in the last decade or so a subgenre of films that swan around in a moody way while sort of gesturing at a social ill. “It’s like a smoke monster thing . . . but also, it’s sort of like, the shame of sexual assault?”. The problem is that these films never develop the horror all that well, and neither do they create striking enough moments to push something really interesting or insightful about their chosen topic. (So I guess the smoke monster/rape allegory is . . . bad?).

This film, on the other hand, doesn’t play any vague games about what it is portraying. It’s dementia. That’s it.

In some ways, this up-front acknowledgement of what’s at play takes some suspense away from the film. But thankfully, the movie stays in its lane, and resists introducing any poorly CGI-rendered representations of Edna’s deterioration or any hysterical character beats. This is a movie about the horror of someone you love decaying---literally in the film’s portrayal---and transforming into someone else in front of your very eyes.

I thought that the film did a really splendid job of creating scenarios that melded reality and the supernatural. The film’s action kicks off with Edna having gone missing. After three days of frantic searching, she turns up. Where has she been? An examination by a local medical professional turns up a strange bruise on her chest, yet she cannot say where it came from. This also filters over into the interactions between Edna, Kay, and Sam. At one point Edna says that she can’t wear her ring anymore and gifts it to Sam. The next day, she spots the ring on Sam’s hand and attacks her, accusing her of stealing it. While “scary old people” are a well-worn trope at this point in horror movies, a lot of Edna’s behavior is perfectly within the bounds of what a person experiencing dementia might do.

Things really kick off in the last act, where Sam and Kay are forced to confront the danger that’s been simmering in the house. This isn’t just a horror movie about someone getting old and losing their personality and their grasp on reality. It’s also a horror movie about watching that happen. It’s also a horror movie about knowing that one day, you might be the one spewing venom at your loved ones and leaving sink taps running for hours. It’s also a horror movie about realizing that one day, you might be put into that caretaker role, and wondering if you have the endurance for it. This is a horror movie about the collision between present, past, and future that happens when different generations come together, and how hard it can be to realize the way that roles are shifting within the family. Sam jokes early on, “First they change your diapers, then you change theirs,” but it’s much more emotionally volatile than that.

I can see why some people wouldn’t care for this one. There’s a degree of predictability to it, a lack of mystery. It trades mainly in unease, creaking floorboards, mysterious thumps, and encroaching dark mold. The one or two times it ventures into jumpscare territory, it does so with middling success. But I found it incredibly effective. I think that what it wants to say---about aging, about caring for the elderly, about anticipating your own advanced years---it says well. The performances are all very solid, and its character arcs resolve in a satisfying way.

I loved relic! I remember When Wooley brought it up, hesitating to recommend it. Back then I described it as a great horror film that doesn't have any “cool” element in it. I don't know that I would watch it again, even though I never had a family member with dementia myself, or at least any close one.


Bella Heathcote was also unrecognizable there from what she was in The Neon Demon.

I think you're right about it not being "cool," but that's kind of what I loved about it. I think that it acknowledges the horror of the situation, but with an eye toward not just being exploitative of the fear that people have about the elderly. The movie, for better or worse, plays things straight, and I ultimately felt like that was a win.

If some CGI dementia monster had popped out of the walls, I would have been rolling my eyes big time. At heart, it's maybe more drama than horror, but I think it's an effective mixture of the two genres.

Wait, I thought you hadn't watched that?

I've seen most (all?) of the animated Cowboy Bebop series.

La Llorona, 2019

Former military man Enrique (Julio Diaz) is on trial for his part in a brutal genocide of the native Mayan people of Guatemala, though he is protected by higher ups in the government. As protestors clamor and chant outside of his home, Enrique is watched over by his wife Carmen (Margarita Kenefic), his daughter Natalia (Sabrina De La Hoz), and his bodyguard Letona (Juan Pablo Olyslager). Natalia’s young daughter, Sara (Ayla-Elea Hurtado) is also part of the small delegation waiting inside of the house. When faithful servant Valeriana (Maria Telon) brings in a new servant named Alma (Maria Mercedes Coroy), strange visions and dreams begin to haunt the various members of the household.

Full of striking imagery and effectively making the horror of genocide intimate and personal, this is a winning, hard-hitting horror/drama.

As I wrote in a recent review, I have a certain appreciation for movies that are about what they are about and create a coherent vision and character arc. That’s definitely the case in this film, in which the crimes and cruelties of Enrique’s elderly General literally come back to haunt him.

What brings some unexpected energy and interest to this film is the fact that the revenge sought by the spirits of the dead isn’t only centered on Enrique---it’s also aimed at the people around Enrique who protect, excuse, and enable him.

Enrique’s main enabler is his wife, Carmen. She listens with what looks like disinterest to absolutely horrifying witness accounts of the way that her husband and his men murdered innocent men, women, and children, committed rapes, debased and dehumanized prisoners, and otherwise brought a rain of violence and pain down on a largely innocent indigenous group. After listening to a woman describe being raped, she coldly remarks that “native women” were always there to tempt Enrique. She frames her husband almost as a victim of his own sexual desires. And then the dreams begin.

There is something particularly insidious about genocide, in that the very scale of it renders it somewhat abstract. If someone says that five or ten people were killed---that is something you can picture in your mind. But if someone says 3000 people were killed, the mind simply fails. This film does a fantastic job of balancing that sense of a swath of destruction while keeping an immediacy to the horrors it portrays. Carmen’s dreams, in which she tries to protect her two young children from encroaching soldiers, push her into the vivid reality of a victim. Paired with a stand-out sequence in which a woman testifies about the violence done to her and to her family (her testimony in her native language communicated to the court accurately but without passion by an interpreter), the specifics and scope of Enrique’s cruelty is not allowed to slide into abstraction.

Much of the supernatural bent of the film relates to Alma, the mysterious new servant. (The old servants are dismissed, all of them native, some of them without pay, and threatened not to complain or they won’t get recommendations for new jobs). Alma immediately bonds with Sara, and one begins to wonder how the child will play into whatever the long game is for the vengeful spirits. Will Sara be spared because of her innocence? Will she be taken as revenge for all of the children who were needlessly, cruelly killed by Enrique’s men? This lingering question of Alma’s intentions toward Sara adds charge to all of their scenes together.

There are also some really beautiful moments in this film. Alma has a luxurious sweep of long black hair, and in one scene the hair billows around her as if she is caught in a strong wind indoors. In the courtroom scene, the woman testifying speaks from behind a thick veil, one that renders her pale and eerie. She is a survivor, and yet her story might just as well be the voice of one of the many dead.

Something I really enjoyed about this film was the way that it interrogates degrees of complicity. There’s no question that Enrique is a monster, and that he deserves what is coming to him. But does Carmen deserve death for her loyalty to her husband and the way that she has turned a blind eye to his crimes? Does Natalia deserve death for continuing to care for her father, though she is disturbed by what she learns about him? What about Sara, who wasn’t even alive when his crimes were committed and seems to know nothing about them? What about Letona, who works hard to protect a man who has brought pain and death to so many? It is easy to accept and even look forward to Enrique’s comeuppance, but the film spends most of its time forcing us to reckon with what justice might look like for all of the people tangential to Enrique.

This was another very solid recommendation and I’d encourage everyone to check it out (and make sure you are choosing the correct film---the 2019 film from Guatemala---as it is a very common title).