Editor’s Note: It is with a bittersweetness that we close out our annual October celebration of horror. For a fourth year in a row, our staff has dedicated countless hours to soaking their screens in blood and giving you 31 great films to watch. Hopefully you’ve learned something along the way, or at the very least had some fun discussing some wicked horror films…

Synopsis: Halloween‘s Donald Pleasence and Carrie‘s Nancy Allen host a look back at horror movies and their effect on us, interspersed with clips from greats like Psycho, The Shining, The Thing, Night of the Living Dead, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Speaking on such diverse topics as sex, terror, Hitchcock, and villains, this 1984 documentary also throws some dramatic narrative into the mix.

Killer Scene

Well since the documentary is pretty much a clip show of horror’s greatest hits you could pull your favorite clip, but one of my favorite bits of the surrounding movie is when a theater full of people are watching Halloween. Laurie Strode has just finished (she thinks) dealing with Michael Myers and she lets her guard down and drops the knife – prompting an audience member to shout at the screen “Don’t drop the knife you asshole!” Then again, the musical montage at the end (no joke) is pure bliss.

Kill Sheet

Sex

Terror in the Aisles doesn’t skimp when it comes to showing the skin, which is something it easily could have done considering it’s just a clip show documentary. They take the high, naked road and show us beautiful boobies from Halloween and many other films, as well as both a sex and shower scene compilation.

Violence

The film shows some notable bits of violence from films like Halloween, Scanners, Psycho, and many others. We see heads explode, eyes pop out, bodies transform, people get stabbed – there’s a decent amount of violence going on – but you’ve seen most of it before.

Scares

The movie actually does a good job of making you jump a few times by stringing together lots of creepy images and hitting you with a barrage of quick jump scares in succession. There is no overarching terror, but there are plenty of scary moments shown.

Final Thoughts

Terror in the Aisles, in large part due to all of the varied clips contained in it, seemed relegated to being a forgotten experience. Released in theaters in 1984 it made a staggering $10+ million – staggering in that it was a theatrically released horror documentary. That’s rare.

Packaged as an extra on the Halloween II Blu-ray release, this short documentary is worth snagging the disc just to get a look at it. Sure, it’s short, yeah it has some silliness to it, but if you ever wanted to see Donald Pleasance yell at a movie screen, this is the documentary for you. Plus, it runs as a checklist of classic horror that you should have already seen.

As a horror fan, everything about this is enjoyable. It’s a greatest hits clip show of some tremendous movies and it puts a smile on my face every time Donald Pleasance says something.

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When the calendar page turns to October, we Rejects have only one thought: horror. To celebrate this grandest and darkest of months, we’ll cover one excellent horror film a day for the entirety of the month. That’s 31 Days of Horror and 31 Films perfect for viewing on a dark, chilly, October night. If you, like us, love horror and Halloween, give us a Hell Yeah and keep coming every day this month for a new dose of adrenaline.

Synopsis: After Warren inherits a nice slice of wilderness, he and a few friends head out on a camping trip to check it out. Unfortunately for Warren and his friends, there are a couple of residents who already call the land home – and a few of them are ready to kill to keep it. Also, they kill for fun.

Killer Scene

I’m a tremendous fan of the opening scene, as it includes the most brutal death in the film and starts the mood off right. I’m torn between really filling you in on this scene or letting you watch it for yourself. Let me just tease you a little. It involves a serrated machete and someone’s most beloved region.

Kill Sheet

Violence

There are relatively few deaths in the film, though one is played out for several minutes while two of the others are especially brutal. The first and last kills alone earn this a three out of five, as they’re very sexual. One involves a groin, the other fisting. The weapon of choice for these country bumpkins is a serrated machete – which is a pretty mean weapon to jab into someone.

Sex

There is one good looking lady in the film and an average babe shows off some pretty average titties. You really can’t give this movie more than one and a half skulls here, but at least the boobs make an appearance.

Scares

Hillbillies don’t make for the most frightening of villains, but Just Before Dawn has an effective score and is well directed by Jeff Lieberman (Squirm, Satan’s Little Helper), which makes it an atmospheric, tense, and creepy movie.

Final Thoughts

Released to theaters in 1981, it’s an early entry into the slasher genre, following and lifting a few things from 1980′s Friday the 13th. It was released on a 2-Disc DVD after a long absence in 2005 and is a pretty easy find these days, though it lacks the notoriety it deserves. If you consider yourself a child of 80′s horror or slashers, this is a definite must see.

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Synopsis: Jack Finney’s novel “The Body Snatchers” gets its second film adaptation by Philip Kaufman in 1978. This time, the setting is changed from a small California town to the teeming metropolis of San Francisco. Donald Sutherland plays Matthew Bennell, a health inspector who stumbles across reports of people claiming their loved ones are not themselves. His colleague Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams) faces similar stories and even suspects her live-in boyfriend Geoffrey has been infected.

After conferring with Matthew’s pop psychology guru friend David Kibner (Leonard Nimoy), they settle on mass hysteria as a cause. However, when Matthew’s other friends (Jeff Goldblum and Veronica Cartwright) discover a mysterious body in the back of their spa, the group soon discovers an insidious alien force has come to earth with the ability to duplicate people.

Killer Scene

Like the original 1956 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, this film relies more on psychological terror than actual horrific scenes. Though, with greater special effects 22 years down the road, the filmmakers were able to show some more intense moments. Most people will point to (no pun intended) the final scene of the film as its most shocking moment, and they’d be right. However, the scene that stuck with me the most for sheer emotionally-draining terror was the duplication scene. In the original movie, Kevin McCarthy and company saw the seed pods bursting open with foam and plastic. That worked for its day, but in this newer version, things were more organic. With Donald Sutherland asleep in a lawn chair and the thin, hairy tendrils of the pods reaching out to his arms, I was hooked. The growth of the pod and the embryonic development of the duplicated bodies were frighteningly realistic. Part of the realism was Sutherland’s spot-on acting as someone drugged into sleep, struggling to wake up. That’s the scene that haunted me as a child.

KillSheet

Violence

Invasion of the Body Snatcherscarries a PG rating, though it was made at a time when PG packed more of a punch than it does today (partly because movies of the 70s were more intense and partly because the PG-13 rating hadn’t yet been established). There’s some significant violence, particularly when Matthew destroys one of the duplicated bodies, or when the dog-human hybrid shows up. However, what stands out more is the icky nature of the pods. Wrapped in a thin, white hair-like substance, these early duplicated bodies are significantly gross, even by today’s standards, in my opinion.

Sex

Again, I cite the PG rating as a warning that this film won’t be a cavalcade of tits and ass. However, there is a nice shot of a topless Brooke Adams at the end. She’s cropped out and later wearing a red dress in the TV version, but the original theatrical cut showed plenty. Sigh… they don’t make PG movies like they used to.

Scares

To this date, I consider Invasion of the Body Snatchers to be one of the scariest movies ever made. Forget masked killers, monsters and torture porn. It is the psychological skull-fucking this movie gives you that makes it work. The original film was meant to be an allegory of the Red Scare. This movie works more as a standard horror movie, though it has some sociological implications as well, taking some well-deserved stabs at pop psychology and the burgeoning self-help trend of the 70s. But all that aside, there’s nothing that will make me lose sleep more than a threat of an unseen invader who will take me over while I sleep. It wasn’t until I was well into high school that I could watch this movie and fall asleep at night, and it’s the only film that has ever had this effect on me.

Final Thoughts

Jack Finney’s novel has been made into two films since 1978: Body Snatchers in 1993 with Gabrielle Anwar and The Invasion in 2007 with Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig. Both films were a sorry let-down from the near perfection of this movie. Of course, this is not to suppress the brilliance of the 1956 film, which was equally awesome. That movie is, as far as I’m concerned, Kevin McCarthy’s legacy, and I usually revisit at least one of these first two films once a year. Along with John Carpenter’s The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a cinematic treasure, which was recently given a Blu-ray treatment. Ignore the goofy hairstyles, the godawful 70s production design and the general silliness of the era in which it was made. It’s a powerful, visceral and disturbing movie, one that any horror fan is remiss having not seen.

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Synopsis: A prostitute becomes embroiled in a murder investigation when a psychopath butchers a woman in the building where she is meeting a client. Anxious to clear herself of any involvement, she teams with the murdered woman’s son to pursue the most likely suspect: a mentally-disturbed female patient of the murdered woman’s psychiatrist. But before they can tighten the noose around this maniac’s neck, our heroic duo find themselves being stalked by their own razor-wielding prey.

Killer Scene

Brian De Palma‘s infatuation with Alfred Hitchcock translates to the screen as a cinematic love letter. In Dressed to Kill he wears his love for Psycho like a garish badge of honor. Dressed to Kill has a structure and, in fact, a plot that is almost exactly that of Hitch’s 1960 classic. Angie Dickinson adorns the Janet Leigh mantle as the “star” of the film who gets “cut the fuck up” by the end of act one. Her death at the end of a gleaming razor in the elevator is the film’s most seminal moment. As much as some people have criticized De Palma for his Hitch aping, the homage here actually informs the effectiveness of the scene. It’s actually the moment wherein you realize De Palma is paying tribute to Psycho so while the surprise is not deluded, the slow realization of his motives as you watch this horrific murder makes the experience borderline transcendent. Plus, in keeping with De Palma’s style, the scene is impeccably shot from several fascinating angles and utilizes the elevator lights to obscure the true identity of the killer. My favorite part of this scene is that the killer waits just inside the elevator doors as Nancy Allen finds the bloody body. She comes so close to getting killed herself without even knowing. Suspense!

Kill Sheet

Violence

Despite the savagery of the aforementioned kill, there aren’t any other murders until the end of the film. The movie operates as a suspense film with several dire situations in which our heroine finds herself, but in terms of violence, Dressed to Kill is definitely quality over quantity.

Sex

There is plenty of sex in Dressed to Kill. De Palma takes the sexual subtext of Alfred Hitchock’s Psycho, gives it a dose of Spanish Fly, and then films it having sex with Angie Dickinson for a good half hour. The scene in which Marion Angie meets her gentleman lover in a cab after their brief interaction in the museum begins with him going down on her in the back of that cab. Angie is also introduced to the audience pleasuring herself in the shower. Nancy Allen’s seduction scene in the psychiatrist’s office is the luscious cherry atop this sex sundae.

Scares

There is a bounty of scares in Dressed to Kill bred of De Palma’s masterful suspense scenes. There seems to be danger at every conceivable turn and the brooding figure of the female psychopath appears suddenly from the darkness on more than one occasion. There is a particularly great scare at the end, as our villain lies in an asylum bed. The nurse assumes the patient is sedated, but is dead wrong. The suddenness of the attack juxtaposed against the lunatic’s slow removal of the nurse’s uniform is brilliant.

Final Thoughts

This is De Palma’s Psycho in much the same way that Blow Out is his version of Rear Window. But if all De Palma was ever good at was copying everything Hitchcock did, he wouldn’t be celebrated as one of America’s greatest directors. He may have borrowed themes and structures from Hitch, but his visual signature is undeniably unique and intensely fascinating. He has the best grasp of the potential and proper usage of split-screen narrative of anyone I have ever seen. I am ashamed to say De Palma is a director I have only discovered within the last year, but I have been ravenously consuming his entire catalogue ever since and he is rapidly becoming one of my favorites.

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Synopsis: “Long live the new flesh!”

Good old fashioned body horror courtesy of the master of such things, David Cronenberg. Videodrome stars James Woods as Max Renn, the sleazy president of CIVIC TV, a Toronto-based TV station, “The One You Take to Bed With You”. The channel focuses on lower quality content, the kind of stuff we get after 1AM on Cinemax these days. Always on the hunt for something more extreme, more what he calls “tough”, Renn believes he’s found his station’s latest offering in the form of Videodrome, a faux snuff show he has come in possession of. But Renn soon believes he is involved in a global conspiracy when the truth about Videodrome and the people behind it begin to reveal themselves, and Renn’s already sick mind deteriorates into hallucinations and madness.

Killer Scene

It’s teased early. Renn complains to his assistant that he thinks he’s getting a rash. Shortly after, while watching a video and caressing his gun – Renn has grown quite paranoid at this point – he looks down and, lo and behold, he’s grown a vagina in his stomach. Well, what would you call it? Naturally, knowing he’s suffering from hallucinations caused by the Videodrome signal, Renn begins toying at it with his gun, then eventually shoving the gun all the way inside. The “stomach vagina” shows back up later in the film, hungry for actual VHS tapes, but this first time we see it is extremely shocking. It’s just one of many scenes in Videodrome that mix pleasure and pain, sexual desire and intense violence, but just saying that phrase, “stomach vagina”, yeah, you pretty much know what I’m talking about if you’ve seen this movie.

Kill Sheet

Violence

Um, yes? As with most of Cronenberg’s offerings, Videodrome is loaded with graphic depictions of body horror. Despite their psychological nature – there’s very little to indicate the moments of extreme gore in this film are actually happening rather than in Renn’s deranged and declining mental state – the depictions are real enough, brought to amazing physicality by special effects master Rick Baker. The blood in Videodrome, the brutality and violence depicted on the video are just the start. The grotesqueness that we see growing in Renn’s mind is some of the most intense moments we’ve ever seen, even from Cronenberg.

Sex

Um, yes? As with most of Cronenberg’s offerings, Videodrome is loaded with graphic depictions of intense sex. Hey, is there an echo in here? Since Renn’s whole job is in finding the most extreme videos of sex and violence, it only stands to reason Videodrome would offer tons of both. More often than not, the two converge. Remember that little description of the VHS tape-eating stomach vagina from earlier? Yeah, that. But the faint of heart shouldn’t worry too much. There’s also some conventional sex in Videodrome. Some, that ends with Renn piercing his girlfriend’s ear with a needle. That’s conventional, right? Oh, and the Japanese girl with the dildo. Don’t ever forget the Japanese girl with the dildo.

Scares

Videodrome is more intensely graphic than suspenseful or scary. Sure, the thought of a TV signal being broadcast that can cause hallucination-inducing tumors in your brain is pretty scary. Baker’s practical effects make the extreme imagery all the more intense, but it’s never the kind of film that makes you leave the lights on. TV off, to be sure, but not lights on.

Final Thoughts

A brilliant film in 1983 when he wrote and directed, and a brilliant film nearly 30 years later, Videodrome is an early effort from a clear genius in the horror film making industry. It’s both surreal in execution and political in nature and touches on a whole slew of themes that are still considered visionary. Videodrome is the kind of horror film that sits just on the outskirts of conventional, horror viewing, but still it sits waiting for new fans to experience it each and every day.

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Synopsis: A contemporary adaptation of the Bram Stoker novel, Ken Russell’s The Lair of the White Worm (1988) begins with archaeology student Angus Flint (In the Loop’s Peter Capaldi) finding a strange serpentine skull in the backyard of an English cottage. After some research, Flint makes the connection between the skull and the “d’Ampton worm,” a giant malevolent worm that was conquered in nearby Stonerich Cavern. The direct ancestor of the worm slayer is the rather charming James d’Ampton (played by a rather charming Hugh Grant), who shares suspicions with Flint that the worm may still be alive under the grounds of their otherwise quaint English hamlet. D’Ampton’s seductive and often leather-bound neighbor, Lady Sylvia Marsh (Amanda Donahue) is an immortal, supernatural force subservient to the worm, and her seductive search for a virgin sacrifice brings about all kinds of over-the-top, schizophrenic greatness.

Killer Scene

Lair of the White Worm is full of brilliantly ridiculous, purely Russell-esque moments that are too fleeting to be consider scenes and too self-consciously ridiculous to be taken seriously, like the film’s many nightmarish visions of nun rape and crucifixion (why these images are in every Russell film I’m not quite sure). But one scene in particular stands alone.

Lady Marsh picks up a hormonal young boy and feeds and bathes him at her home. As she washes him, she asks him to stand up, and she then, erm, services him. As he looks more than happy about his predicament, Marsh bares giant serpentine teeth and returns off-screen to induce a giant “chomp” sound. The boy is left paralyzed in the pool to die in a great deal of pain.

Kill Sheet

Violence

There’s some pretty wonderful gore throughout Russell’s film. While much of it comes from Marsh predictably biting her mostly male victims, Russell finds ways to keep both the attacks and the protagonists’ attempts to defend themselves creative, whether it be a policeman having his eyes gouged out or, in one of the film’s best moments, a surprisingly bad-ass Hugh Grant slicing up one of Marsh’s worm-zombiefied victims in mid-air.

Sex

This is a Ken Russell film, after all. But as such, expect the sex throughout to be more decidedly aberrant than titillating. Any conventional promise of sex is usually one of Marsh’s ploys to sink her teeth into somebody. But then again, there’s some crazy Russell moments like Marsh appropriating a large drill-like phallus to complete the virgin sacrifice. You can read that last sentence again, if you’d like.

Scares

While there may be a light jump scare here and there, The Lair of the White Worm prefers entertaining excess over any attempt to actually instill fear in any of its viewers.

Final Thoughts

Easily one of Ken Russell’s most entertaining films, The Lair of the White Worm is a unique experience for anybody willing to take the ride. The plot doesn’t matter, scares are scarce, and Russell has never been big on subtlety, but his outlandish vision and kinetic style is quite enough to make for one hell of an enjoyable horror film. Plus, you see High Grant in a way you’ve never seen him before: not boring.

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Synopsis: Where do you take Jason when he’s already been through the woods all the way to New York City? Why you take him to space, of course! In the distant future, Voorhees and his most recent victim are resurrected by advanced technology. Not one to care about details like the year or where the hell he is, Jason immediately begins dismembering people.

Killer Scene

In what is perhaps my favorite scene in any installment of the venerable Friday the 13th franchise, Uber Jason Voorhees is momentarily delayed when he enters a virtual reality room. What could cause the unstoppable killer to stop? Why, a recreation of a lakeside cabin, complete with two sex starved teens willing to bear their boobs. Jason responds in the most logical way ever, zipping them up in sleeping bags and then beating them to death with one another.

Kill Sheet

Violence

Jason X just might have the highest body count of any slasher flick. Well, Freddy vs Jason has a pretty high one, but in this space based adventure, Voorhees cuts his way through a platoon of space marines, a group of students, some military brass, and a handful of guards. All told he inflicts pain on more than 20 people and a couple of virtual people as well, including writer Todd Farmer in a cameo.

Sex

In a movie that can otherwise be classified as excessive, we really don’t get the gratuitous nudity one expects. There are some fake robo-nipples, a sex scene, some hot chicks, and two briefly but simultaneously shared sets of breasts. Unfortunately, the hottest actress in the movie never shows her breasts, but she does bare her midriff throughout, before getting her face frozen and smashed into a sno-cone.

Scares

By this point, Jason had long since stopped being scary. Nothing here to rattle your bones but the occasional jump scare and Jason’s gross face.

Final Thoughts

This is a fun, goofy film. You might question its inclusion on the list – but to that I say this is my list and I’ll do whatever the hell I want. Jason X is fun because it’s absurdist. The people behind this movie recognized that Jason Voorhees had become a joke. He was an unstoppable killing machine just marching through people swinging a machete. What more could you do with him?

It’s telling of the state of the franchise that “send him to space” was not only logical, but executed. If you’re looking for anything more than dumb people getting brutalized, look elsewhere. But if you’re ready to rock a Halloween party, eat too many Milk Duds, drink too much Octoberfest beer, and generally just not give a shit for a night, then Jason X is the perfect complement to that. How can you not love this movie? It’s Jason Voorhees. In space.

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