Netflix Halloween

I have watched quite a few of the horror films on Netflix. Most of them are rubbish but here are some I can recommend (if not always unreservedly) should you want something spooky to watch over Halloween weekend.

30 Days of Night

One for the gore fans, 30 Days of Night sees a group of absolute bloodsucking bastards descend on an isolated Alaskan town as it bids goodbye to the sun for a month. Violent and impressively nasty, it's not for the squeamish but wrings effective scares from its nightmarish premise.

As Above, So Below

I normally dislike found footage films, and As Above, So Below commits many of the sub-genre's sins (cheap jump scares, making you wonder why the idiots keep filming), but wins points for going absolutely batshit mental in it's final 20 minutes. A group of urban explorers venture into the Parisian sewers looking for the plot and keep heading downwards until they reach possibly Hell itself. Not brilliant by any stretch but worth a look.

The Babadook

One of my favourite films (horror or otherwise) of the last few years and one of the best films on Netflix. A single mother and her odd son become haunted by the titular whatsit after reading the world's scariest bedtime story. Most of my favourite horror films don't scare me, but The Babadook had me hiding behind a cushion. Add two amazing central performances and a rich thematic depth exploring grief and bereavement and you have one truly astonishing film.

From Beyond

Another (very loose) HP Lovecraft adaptation by Reanimator director Stuart Gordon, with a scientist again messing with things Man Was Not Meant To Know. Instead simply bringing the dead back to life, this one involves all sorts of interdimensional nasties and stomach churning body horror. Laced with black humour and filled with dated but charming physical special effects, it's one to watch with a few beers in you.

Housebound

A young woman is fitted with an electronic tag and sentenced to house arrest back at the family home. Unfortunately said home appears to be haunted. As much a comedy as a horror, Housebound features one of my favourite female protagonists of recent times; practical, world weary and not about take any shit from anyone, ghost or not.

Insidious

Though it loses it badly towards the end by over-explaining the nature of it's big bad and climaxing in what looks like a mid-80s soft rock video, the first hour of Insidious is actually a great mainstream horror film. It has some effective and inventive scares including one jumpy moment that still sends shivers down my spine.

The Keep

An early curio from Michael Mann, this sees a bunch of German soldiers in WW2 coming up against a demonic entity in the titular castle. Genuinely odd and unsettling, it won't be for everyone but is worth a look if you're after something different.

Paranormal Activity

I intend to write a longer post about why I think the Paranormal Activity films squander their interesting premise, but suffice to say here at the first film is still an effective chiller. Number 3 is also surprisingly good, probably delivering the best scares of the series (oh god that bit with the bed sheet). Worth a look if you haven't watched it. Micah is a dick though.

Spring

Almost feels like a spoiler calling this one a horror, and the horror elements are pretty low on the list of what I like about it. A young American man, mourning his mother and having pissed off the local gangster, sods off to Italy where he meets a beguiling and gorgeous young woman. Obviously she's not what she seems, but the film doesn't take the obvious route at any point. Part naturalistic drama, part romance and part horror, Spring is an odd merging of genres but it makes it work. Also I didn't cry at the end. Nope. Definitely not.

What We Do In The Shadows

More comedy than horror, but has it's moments. A mockumentary about a group of vampires living in New Zealand (3 of these 10 are Antipodean btw, just felt it worth mentioning), it shows how they deal with modern life, vampire hunters and the local werewolf pack. Genuinely funny but with enough spookiness to satisfy your Halloween cravings.

All of your happy belongs to Negan

Spoilers for the latest Walking Dead and the last but one Ash Vs Evil Dead follow. I'm only comparing them because I watched them both last night.

God that was bleak. Even by the increasingly grim standards of The Walking Dead. The show runners now seem to be on a mission to suck all of the joy out of their vast army of viewers, leaving shambling, desiccated husks who can only scowl and buy merchandise.

And the violence. Hoo boy the violence! People beaten to a bloody pulp with a barbed wire wrapped baseball bat! Some severe hatchet work! A young boy nearly getting his arm cut off by his dad! And you just thought Negan was going to talk everyone to death the way he was incessantly prattling on for two hours (which is quite a feat during 45 minutes of television).

But no. First Red Haired Army Man (I rarely remember the names of TWD characters, there's little point and they're basically cardboard cut outs) went out telling Negan to “suck his nuts”, which was bad ass in a juvenile sort of way. It took bloody long enough to get to this point, the show holding off from resolving the cliffhanger as long as possible. Red getting it elicited little more than a roll of the eyes, given that he'd done nothing but mope around for at least half a season by now.

But then out of nowhere Glen gets it as well. I have to admit, I wasn't expecting it and this feels like a death that means a tiny bit something to the show going forward. For one, he's one of the handful of characters whose name I remember, meaning that he at least had a character. For seconds, how much more shit are they going to heap on poor Maggie (hey, that's two!)?

Thing is though, it doesn't mean enough, not any more. Even the characters with names only seem significant now because they've stuck around for a while. I'm not expecting a ton of thematic depth or sweeping character arcs from TWD, but when the death of someone who's been around since the begin only elicits a second a shock then a bit of a shrug, something has gone a bit awry.

TWD has fallen into a massive rut and has gone back to it's usual two wells for drama: a “shock” character death and a new villain. But shock character deaths are no longer remotely shocking on this show, like at all. If Rick (3!) or Carl (4!) had died then maybe that would've been something, but mostly it's just meh-time now.

As for Negan, he's probably the most annoying in an expanding list of irritating TWD villians. Jeffrey Dean Morgan is clearly having a blast, but is ill served by a script which mistakes endless yammering for threatening.

The combination of wearying, cynical, anyone can die nihilism and nerve grating new big bad means that TWD is no longer anything remotely approaching fun to watch for me. I think I'm going to part ways with it here and maybe just read other people's hate-watch commentary. Go me!

By contrast, Ash vs Evil Dead is ridiculously fun to watch. It exists on a plane of berserk hyper-kinetic ultraviolence; a profane, blood spattered cartoon which only slows down for a few seconds before the next slapstick horror routine. It also has a kick ass soundtrack. While the latest episode I saw didn't match the last week's jaw-dropping morgue shenanigans (both one of the funniest and most disgusting things I've ever seen on television), it was still a riotous half hour.

AvED's characters are necessarily broadly drawn, but they still have more depth than TWDs moping identikit cast. Ash's dad has only been in 3 episodes (up to now, this show being what it is), but his death at the end of the episode felt more meaningful than whole cemetery full from the other show.

It even outdoes the other show in terms of villains. As funny and fun as AvED is, I've had a nightmare about the Deadites every single night I've watched an episode. They're fucking awful things, indiscriminately possessing, slaughtering, maiming and torturing their way through whole swathes of complete innocents, cackling gleefully all the while. The utter bastards even laugh while getting carved up or boomsticked to death.

I'm not going to make a case for AvED being horror's Breaking Bad or anything. It is still basically a live action cartoon, one where our hero gets pulled through a corpse's arsehole or a jock get his cock bitten off. Golden Age of TV it ain't. But it is one of the most ridiculously joyful things on tv at the moment, and I'll take that over the moping dead right now.

Two films prove that humans are the real monsters. Also possibly Satan.

This weekend saw the Celluloid Screams horror festival emerge from it's crypt and shamble into Sheffield's Showroom cinema for 3 days of new and classic scare flicks. I could only catch two this year, but both are worth seeing.

Some clearly marked spoilers for both films follow the basic reviews below.

Sean Byrne's The Devil's Candy follows unpleasant events a remote Texan house. We open with middle aged manchild Ray blasting out some distorted power chords in his room to drown out the Satanic voices that are keeping him from sleeping (I've been there). After his mum tells him to cut it out and warns him that he's going “back to the hospital”, she's shortly done in by a Gibson Flying V to the back of the head.

Post credits the now empty (and cheap to buy) house is snapped up by heavy metal loving struggling artist Jesse, his wife Astrid and tweenage (I don't think she's 13 yet, her age isn't mentioned as far as I recall) metalhead daughter Zooey. Jesse is reduced to painting twee butterfly heavy commissions for a local bank because his shonky death metal album cover artwork isn't exactly wowing the nearby art gallery owners. The Hellmans (ha!) are convincingly shown to be an unconventional if loving family and sympathy for them is effectively built before shit starts to go massively wrong.

And go massively wrong shit most certainly does. Ray, apparently still at large after doing in the old dear, comes back to the homestead, creeping out the adults but endearing himself to Zooey with their mutual love of Flying Vs. To make matters infinitely worse, Jesse starts hearing the same Satanic murmurings that Ray does, putting him into an occasional trance but improving his artwork in decidedly creepy ways.

The Devil's Candy doesn't do much new but it is well written, acted and filmed, with Byrne pulling off some nice compositions and the odd creepy long shot. He doesn't go to the cheap jump scare well to often and creates some memorably chilling and horrifying moments. A nice touch is that the music and imagery of metal, so often a punchline in films, is treated with respect and expertly woven into the plot. The link between metal and horror is rarely made this explicit from the film side of things.

Unfortunately the good work earlier in the film is undone by a rote and overblown ending which almost derails the whole enterprise. This coupled with a lack of originality means it doesn't come fully recommended but is worth catching if there's nothing else on. 3/5

Meanwhile, Creepy sees Pulse director Kiyoshi Kurosawa return to the horror genre with a similar sense of style to his earlier masterpiece. After a post arrest interview with a “perfect psychopath” goes catastrophically wrong, leading to his injury and two deaths, Detective Takakura retires. He and his wife Yasuko (and their giant floof monster dog Max) move to a properly dismal looking Japanese town so he can take up a job as a university lecturer.

There, a post grad student piques his interest in the mysterious disappearance of a family in a nearby equally squalid post industrial town (seriously, this vision of Japan is less “exotic neon wonderland” and more “Asian South Yorkshire”, i.e. the one that loads of people probably live in). This brings the attention of one of Takakura's former colleagues and together three investigate further, mostly by interviewing Saki, the hugely unreliable remaining daughter of the missing household.

Equally mysterious is the behaviour of Yasuko and Takakura's deeply odd new neighbour Mr Nishino (a brilliant performance from Teruyuki Kagawa, turning from aloof evasiveness to affronted hostility on a dime). Both of the couple (and Max) immediatley peg Nishino as “a creep”, but he seems harmless enough and soon he and his daughter Mio are coming round for dinner.

I'm probably not spoiling much to say that both of these elements are linked, but things do proceed in unexpected and deeply upsetting ways. Creepy has an atmosphere and style that will be immediately familiar to anyone who has watched Pulse. There is little in the way of traditional scares, instead building an atmosphere of slowing escalating dread and almost suffocating tension through unsettling sound design, camera shots that are held slightly too long and nuances of performance from his excellent cast.

Unlike Pulse, the plot is relatively straight forward and there are rich veins of dark humour threaded throughout, something the all pervading melancholy of the earlier film wouldn't allow for. Creepy isn't as good as Pulse (because frankly few things are) but is a haunting film that will remain with you for several days after viewing. 4/5

Some fairly large spoilers for both films follow.

Both of these films are essentially about serial killers, albeit of different types. They both portray real life horror and evil in separate ways.

The Devil's Candy tries to make it ambiguous about whether Ray, who has been killing children to feed to Satan as “candy” for years thanks to the voices, is actually possessed. While this old trick is generally fine with me, it's not one that Byrne pulls off especially well. Despite Jesse also hearing the voices, nothing ever comes of it. When evil is defeated at the end of the film, it is through fairly conventional (if ridiculously overblown) means. Ray is clearly severely mentally ill and Jesse could simply be coincidentally hearing the voice and going to into his little art trances through stress and listening to too much Darkthrone (not that he ever does during the film, but you know what I mean). Ray is still terrifying, a large, powerful man convinced that he's on a mission by his own misfiring brain. It may be overblown, but people like that have existed in real life.

Meanwhile Nishino is a chillingly authentic portrayal of a strange, pathetic little man using his odd knack for getting in people's heads to make them commit terrible acts on his behalf. When forced to get his own hands dirty he throws a petulant little sulk. He insists he is not a criminal, despite having several deaths he is responsible for. In one scene, when in physical danger, he scuttles around on his hands and knees like a frightened animal, a grimace of fear on his face. He's also absolutely terrifying, his utter sociopathic tendencies conveyed convincingly in an amazing performance. While watching I was reminded of the terrible crimes of real life Japanese serial killer Futoshi Matsunaga an arsehole of some magnitude. It added an extra layer of quesy unease to already bleak film.