31 Days of Horror # 31 In the Mouth of Madness (dir. John Carpenter, 1994)

 **SPOILERS for this one...sorry.

‘God’s not supposed to be a hack horror writer.’

Dr Saperstein - where have we heard that name before, damn I love a horror movie Easter egg! (John Glover) - prepares for a new patient in-take at an unnamed asylum. Dragged in by two porters is insurance investigator John Trent (Sam Neill), screaming that he’s very definitely NOT MAD. Except Trent’s decorating his padded cell, asylum issue Pjs and face with black crayon crosses. So, he might be a bit mad. Or is he?

It seems there’s a madness spreading across the city, and on the request of Saperstein, Dr. Wrenn (David Warner) is called on to assess Trent to confirm if he’s ‘one of them’.

Trent has an incredible story to tell Dr Wrenn, that begins when he’s hired by the publisher of missing ‘bigger than Stephen King’ horror writer Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow). Cane’s gone missing with an unfinished manuscript and the head of his publishing house, Jackson Harglow (Charlton Heston), wants it.

Cane’s books are so popular, fans will kill to get their hands on them, and his agent has gone on a axe-murdering spree.

Trent hasn’t even heard of Cane, which is kind of weird for an author that’s more famous than Stephen King – even people that aren’t fans have heard of him. Trent’s also dismissive of what he considers low-grade shit only morons would like, but when he reads them himself he has to grudgingly admit that they’re at least page-turners.

Trent’s investigations lead him to take a road trip with Cane’s editor Linda (Julie Carmen) to find Cane’s fictional town, Hobbs End. Strange things begin to happen - a painting changes when you turn your back, kids roam the otherwise empty streets of Hobbs End in menacing packs - which Trent dismisses as a publicity stunt created to hype the new book. Linda admits that this was supposed to be a stunt, but now Cane really is missing and they appear to be characters in the new book, which she’s only read part of.

As things get stranger, Trent desperately tries to escape Hobbs End, but Cane has other plans for him, Linda and….the whole world.

That sums up the plot very basically, but In the Mouth of Madness is a wild ride that’s covering a lot of themes in classic John Carpenter style. It’s a film that needs more than one watch to fully appreciate. It has moments that are supremely creepy (a cyclist looming out of the dark on a stretch of isolated road) and moments that are laugh out loud funny (a horrified Trent trying to prise Linda off when she attempts to seduce him ‘for the plot’).

This movie metas hard. As it progresses, you’re going to question what’s really happening. Is Trent trapped in a book within a book within a film? Is he just a character in Cane’s book, a creation of the author that only exists within the pages? Trent, of course, only exists within the confines of the film itself, a fact he becomes aware of in the final scene of the film; a hysterical Trent sitting in an empty cinema watching a film called In the Mouth of Madness starring himself.

Sam Neill is, as always, great. He does unhinged nerdy pompousness so well, and his comic timing is golden. His delivery of the line ‘never throw chips at a driver!’ is worth the streaming cost alone.

The rest of the cast are great, too, with Julie Carmen playing it straight compared to Sam Neill having the time of his life walking around banging things, rolling his eyes and declaring ‘this is REALITY!’

Content warning: I’m pleased to say this is pretty safe. There’s no dead dogs, no suicides and no sexual assault unless you count Linda lunging at Trent and trying to snog him. It’s a good starter / introduction to the genre, either for people that don’t like slashers / realistic violence or for younger audiences. There’s some jump scares, some gooey creatures, a head-on-backwards spider walk, but nothing to give you nightmares. Oh...I almost forgot that Trent punches Linda in the face, but she sort of deserves it. And it shouldn’t be funny, but it is.

Final thoughts: Do you read Sutter Cane?

31 Days of Horror # 30 Kill List (2011, dir. Ben Wheatley)

 ‘Daddy’s showing off.’

Former solider Jay (Neill Maskell) hasn’t had a job since he came back from a failed mission in Kiyv. His wife Shel (MyAnna Burning) is desperate for him to get a job; they’re broke. But Jay is also broken, and he’s angry and abusive, and prone to fits of explosive uncontrollable rage.

Shel invites his war friend Gal (Michael Smiley) and Gal’s girlfriend Fiona (Emma Fryer) over for dinner, which starts off bad, gets worse and then is sort of OK in the end, if you’re alright with your dinner guests fucking about with things in your house without you knowing.

Gal persuades Jay to do a hit job for The Client (Struan Rodger) who has a long kill list, but when Jay’s increasing unprofessionalism and violence threaten Shel and their son Sam things spiral. Jay’s not content with clean hits, he needs to absolutely annihilate those on the list and anyone else who happens to inadvertently get in the way. What’s weird though, is that before they die, the hits thank Jay.

What starts off as a crime film in the style of Lock Stock becomes something much darker as the story progresses, and the final few minutes are brutal. 

Content warning: Extreme violence

Final thoughts: Confirms my suspicion that people who work in HR suck.

31 days of Horror # Identity (2003, dir. James Mangold)

 ‘I saw you in an orange grove.’

A midnight hearing takes place to decide the fate of mass murderer Malcolm Rivers (Pruitt Taylor Vince). Dr Malik (Alfred Molina) is determined to stay Malcolm’s execution on the grounds that evidence supporting an insanity defence were not introduced in his trial.

In the meantime, fate brings ten strangers to a run-down motel on a rainy night when all roads in and out are flooded, and the phone lines are down.

There’s the motel manager, sleazy Larry (John Hawkes) George and Alice York (John C McGinley and Leila Kenzle) and Alice’s son Timmy (Brett Loehr), chauffer driver Ed (John Cusack) and his employer, career-stalled actress Suzanne (Rebecca DeMornay) newly-weds Ginny (Clea DuVall) and Lou (William Lee Scott), sex-worker Paris (Amanda Peet), cop Rhodes (Ray Liotta - RIP) and the prisoner he’s transporting, Robert (Jake Busey).

When Suzanne’s decapitated head is found in one of the laundry room’s washer driers, of course suspicion falls on Robert. But then Robert is also brutally murdered, the remaining guests must work out who the killer is; the thing is, they all think it could be any of them. Paranoia takes hold, with no-one knowing who they can trust. Things are further confused when the bodies disappear as if they were never there and Larry admits he’s not actually the hotel manager.

To say any more than that would give away a twist that’s not at the end of the film (though there is a twist at the end, too). What I can talk about is the feel of the film, and say it’s a delight to watch John Cusack spend so much time being soaking wet.

The film opens with a reading of the ghostly poem Antigonish by William Hughes Mearns. If you had a poetry book as a kid, you’ll probably know it as the little man who wasn’t there poem: ‘Yesterday upon the stair / I met a man who wasn’t there / he wasn’t there again today / I wish, I wish he’d go away’. This sets us up for the theme of the film, and it’s meaning becomes clear when you get to the twist.

The motel has a very unreal feel to it, it’s like a place in a video game, and this you’ll discover, is deliberate. It seems to be in a inescapable time-loop – when Robert attempts an escape, he just finds himself back in the motel’s diner with no explanation as to why.

Identity is a perfect Halloween watch. There’s no ghosts, (despite the poem) but there is an atmosphere of wrongness, and that’s before people start dying in horrible ways. Some of the story is told in brief flashbacks, so the first minutes you’d think this was a completely different kind of film.

Get the blankets, light some candles and turn the lights off. You’re in for a real treat with this one.

Content warning: the twist. Sorry.

Final thoughts: when I came home last night at three, the man was waiting there for me.

31 Days of Horror # 28 The Blair Witch Project (1999 dirs. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez)

‘I’m going to die out here’ 

Film students Heather (Rei Hance, then credited as Heather Donohue) Josh (Joshua Leonard) and Mike (Michael C Williams) head out into the woods in Burkittsville, Maryland, to make a documentary about local legend the Blair Witch. 

They interview locals, all who have their own creepy stories about the woods, and events over the years that have happened there. 

After their first night in the woods, they get very, very lost. Eerie noises wake them in the middle of the night, and mini cairns appear outside their tent in the morning. Strange stick figures hang from the trees and they lose the map and run out of food. 

As fear, exhaustion and hunger take hold, the three descend into paranoia and hopelessness. Then Josh disappears over night and all that’s left of him appears to be a parcel of blood, hair and teeth wrapped in a scrap of his shirt. They can hear him screaming for help in the darkness, but they can’t find him. 

They spend 8 days lost in the woods before finding an abandoned cabin that’s a callback to the townsfolk interviews that we see at the start of the film. It’s here that the film ends, in a final shocking scene that would either have you saying ‘fuck!’ if you paid attention to the dialogue at the start of the film, or, ‘what the fuck?’ if you didn’t. 

The Blair Witch is often credited as the first found footage film. It’s not – it’s preceded by Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and The Last Broadcast (1998). It can be credited for the first viral marketing campaign, though, with a website dedicated to the missing film makers and a pre-release mockumentary called The Curse of the Blair Witch that convinced early-days internet audiences that what they were watching was real, and not fiction. 

The actors, who also operated the cameras and sound equipment, had to keep out of the public eye once the film was released to keep up the idea that this was a real film made by real missing students. While the film was a critical and commercial success, the three actors suffered in the early days of the film’s release. Rei Hance in particular was never really able to shake the legacy of Heather Donohue – she retired from acting in 2008 and changed her name in 2020.

I can remember going to see Blair Witch, at the Empire Cinema in High Wycombe in the autumn of 1999. I thought, and still do think, that it’s a very scary film. Like Wolf Creek, the terror comes from isolation, and being lost in a wilderness you don’t know. I remember at the time thinking how easy it would be to lose your mind if you were in that situation. Hungry, sleep-deprived, cold and scared, how long would you survive? 

Content warning: motion sickness is a big issue in this one. Other than that, there’s not much to fear except your imagination.

Final thoughts: If you go down to the woods today, you better KEEP HOLD OF YOUR FUCKING MAP. 

31 Days of Horror # 27 Drag Me to Hell (2009, dir. Sam Raimi)

'I beg you and you shame me?'

Loan manager Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is desperate for a promotion, so when elderly Mrs Janush (Lorna Raver) comes into the bank pleading for an extension on late mortgage payments, Christine turns her down in an attempt to show her boss she’s capable of making tough decisions. 

Later that night as Christine’s leaving work, she’s attacked in her car by Mrs Janush. She manages to fight her off, but the old lady’s not done with her yet. On the way home, Christine and boyfriend Clay (Justin Long) walk past a physic shop. Something draws Christine in, and she asks the fortune teller Rham (Dileep Rao) to read her palm. He tells her that a dark spirit has attached itself to her.

Christine has three days to escape the curse, and the now-dead Mrs Ganush is going to make those final three days a living nightmare. Clay is the classic horror movie boyfriend who refuses to believe Christine and tells her all the horrible things happening to her are all in her head.

Drag Me to Hell is a wild ride. It’s very, very gross. There’s chin-gumming, flies going up noses, fire-hydrant blood spray and embalming fluid gushing out of a corpse. It is a comedy horror though, so it’s so over the top it’s not that scary. There’s even a talking goat. OK, the goat’s possessed by a human spirit, it can’t actually talk. I don’t know how that works. 

It’s also...problematic. The portrayals of the non-white characters fall into racist stereotypes. Mrs Janush is Romani, so what we have is a movie about a cute blonde white girl being subjected to a curse by a filthy gypsy with rotten teeth and dirty fingernails. The people that try and help her could fall into the Magical Person of Colour trope (this trope is usually more specific,  referring to a Black person, the ‘magical negro’, but here they are an Indian man and Hispanic woman). 

Christine never really seems to accept that she might have made the wrong choice. Over her final three days, she blames her boss and the bank but doesn’t shoulder any of responsibility herself until it’s way too late. Even then, she only does it because she thinks she’s safe. We are given some context to Christine’s drive for success; like Clarice Starling, she grew up po white trash on a farm, her dad’s dead and her mum drinks. Clay’s snobby parents don’t think that she’s good enough for him because she didn’t go to an Ivy League school. 

Christine pays the piper in the film’s few minutes and if you ask me she deserves it purely for killing her little kitten in a daft blood sacrifice. But as a YouTube review pointed out, Mrs Janus can banish people to Hell, but she can’t pay her mortgage? 

Content warning: the kitten dies, grave desecration, floppy corpse kisses. 

Final thoughts: It's a bit of a disappointment from the man that bough us The Evil Dead. 

31 Days of Horror # 26 Ginger Snaps (2000, dir. John Fawcett)

 'Wrists are for girls, I'm slitting my throat'.

Death obsessed sisters Brigitte (Emily Perkins) and Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) don’t have any friends outside of their unhealthily close friendship. At school they’re bullied and their fellow students think they’re weird. 

Their suburban neighbourhood is is experiencing a series of violent dog mutilations and on the same day that Ginger gets her very first period she’s bitten by a werewolf. From then on, Ginger’s different. She’s no longer the awkward, shy girl who does PE in her coat, she’s a high school hallway strut queen in a tight sweater. She’s also growing thick white hair over her body, long, curved nails, a little waggy tail and she has a thirst for the blood of teenage boys and the neighour’s dog.

After popular girl bully Trina (Danielle Hampton) accidentally dies in the sister’s house Brigitte and Cillian Murphy lookalike Jason Dean coded dropout drug dealer Sam (Kris Lemche) try and work out a cure.

Content warning: a lot of dogs die.

Final thoughts: I think I'm getting my period. 

31 days of Horror # 25 Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992, dir. Francis Ford Coppola)

 ‘I have crossed oceans of time to find you.’

Watching this on a Saturday afternoon, I drifted off into a nap where I dreamed that I was driving my car while I was asleep. After I woke up, confused and groggy, I realised that I never watched this film the whole way through without falling asleep at some point. There were large sections of it that I didn’t remember, especially towards the end.

Though it's been done hundreds of time, adapting Bram Stoker’s novel can’t be easy. It’s epistolary, and told from the point of view multiple narrators. If you haven’t read it, you really should. If you haven’t watched this film...I’m not sure that you should.

The plot very basically is that Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves) travels to Transylvania to help his new client Count Dracula (Gary Oldman) to close the sale on a London property after the previous solicitor Renfield (Tom Waites) is sectioned by Dr Seward (Richard E Grant). Renfield eats flies so that sort of makes sense.

Meanwhile, Jonathon’s  fiancée Mina (Winona Ryder) waits at home and hangs out with her friend Lucy (Sadie Frost) who is trying to work out which one of three horny men she’ll marry.

Dracula sees a photo of Mina and believes that she’s the reincarnation of his lost love Elisabeta. He traps Jonathon in his castle with three sexy horny sex vampires and he heads to London to find Mina. On his trail is Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins). Dracula goes for horny Lucy first of all, turning her into one of his horny sex vampires. 

Mina forgets she’s married to Jonathon and gets horny for Dracula, and then there’s a battle for her soul and for Dracula to be reunited with Elisabeta in the great hereafter. The end.

It’s really long, clocking in and 2 hours 16 minutes. It’s relentlessly horny. Everyone wants to fuck, all the time, particularly Lucy who spends most of her screentime with one boob hanging out. Everyone knows Keanu Reeves’ English accent is awful, but I rarely hear mentioned that Winona Ryder’s isn’t that great either. (Tom Waites does a great job though.)

The costume design is great, especially for Dracula, who gets to wear a shimmery gold cloak that looks like Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss painting, and a red silk Chinese dressing gown with a long train and wing-like sleeves. There’s one outfit where he looks like Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka. Sadie Frost gets to wear a huge shimmery silvery-white dress with a vast lace ruff and Mina’s  final scene dress is beautiful.

The special affects are really impressive, and some of the scene transitions are really clever.

This is an auteur film, though, and it shows. Apparently it had a 40 million dollar budget, and terrible things happen when you give a big-driven director that much money to make a film (see Megalopolis, also directed by FGC, which was so fucking bad I turned it off half way through).

It’s actually kind of boring, which is probably why I keep falling asleep. It's too long and there's too much of Lucy's love interests who, apart from Dr. Seward, don't really add anything. Keanu Reeves is beautiful, though, and apparently he tried really, really hard with the accent. 

Content warning: boobs, boobs, some boobs, a tit, boobs, eating spiders

Final thoughts: I have crossed oceans of time watching this film