This month, being that of scary movies hitting theatres and playing on repeat on cable, I’ve decided to endure a genre that I typically avoid, horror. I’ve come to the conclusion — after falling in love with the recent films of James Wan — that it’s not horror I hate but band genre/storytelling. There are good ways to push jump scares into a movie that I as a human being would just shoot the bastard and run the other direction and still make me jump because I’m invested in the characters. Just like with every other film genre.

So this month I’ve promised myself to watch, at least, one horror film new to me a day this month. That means a grand total of at least 31 horror films from the 30s to today that I’ve ignored because I’m a man who doesn’t get scared. I’ll be posting short, one/two paragraph, reactions to each film throughout the month and I hope you enjoy. Here’s the first dispatch:

1. REPULSION (1965) (dir. Roman Polanski)

I’ve been hearing nothing but adoration for this film for so long and been meaning to watch it for even longer as the psychological rape scare movie of ever, but how could one be disappointed anymore than this? Polanski and I aren’t on the best of terms but I love Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown, isn’t that enough to keep things sane?

I was surprised how much while watching this movie I felt rumblings of David Lynch just whispering in to Polanski’s ear throughout. So much of it reminded me of Eraserhead (how i hate that movie so much) and I started just hating the main character of Carol more than getting into what was actually happening to her. Maybe it’s because after a while I wasn’t sure what was really happening to her and felt it could just be her manifesting these things because she was away from her sister, or am I reading too much into this?

2. BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974) (dir. Bob Clark)

Sometimes it’s great to see the crazed slasher films of the 70s. Reminds me so much of why Grindhouse was a thing a few years back and why Machete works. More than that though it makes me think of films I already love, like Halloween, where it was kind of stupid but what it does it does so well. What this (and Halloween) do so well is that it creates a weirdly off camera scare that it ends up being more frightening than just seeing a big dude with an axe that would straight up murder everyone. It’s like when I watch Jackie Chan films and I know already going in that they’re going to have a slew of bad guys that all can kill me in a second but somehow Jackie will wiggle his way into crazed positions and take the out… I should by now just bee scared for the bad guys.

Here however, there’s this idea of these girls — you know the frailer sex — being preyed on by this random guy that we don’t know, but we as an audience know he’s hiding in the attic, is calling and frightening these women with all these noises that they can’t quite decipher but we (the audience) recognize is the sounds of him murdering all the women he’s already killed. Even when we see someone else take the fall because he’s distraught more than anything else.

Side note: How many killers got away because of how hard it was to trace a call in the 70s?

3. THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE (2001) (dir. Guillermo Del Toro)

Guillermo Del Toro is a filmmaker that I’ve discussed — at least in podcast form — that he’s one of the good ones with a mixed deck constantly. In that whatever a screenwriter deals him to work with he’s going to make as well as he possibly can, but at the end of the day may or may not end being marked off as unmemorable… I’d be happy to mark this film as the opposite.

The usual Del Toro story of a child’s perspective of a very adult perspective of the world as it’s on going during war and lots of questionable morals being thrown all over the place. I adore films like this mainly because it reminds me (like the world does all the while) that adults are the worst beasts and monsters ever and that if I had the choice I’d be a child forever.