Gothic Horror Continues Even When Halloween Is Over

HALLOWEEN HORROR: Late Night With The Devil (2023)

On Halloween night 1977, in a bid to win the ratings war, late night talk show host Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) hosted a live demonic possession on his show, Night Owls.

The (faux) documentary, Late Night With The Devil, screens the whole show, intercut with black and white, candid, behind-the-scenes footage when the talk show cuts to commercials.

It opens though with an account of Jack's rise to fame (narrated by Michael Ironside), his involvement with The (the very real) Grove, the tragic death of his wife Madeleine (Georgina Haig), and his constant struggles - and failures - to score better ratings than The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.

The documentary segues smoothly into Jack's Halloween special episode of Night Owls, which opens with an obviously fake psychic, Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), who clashes with magician-turned-professional sceptic Carmichael Haig (Ian Bliss).

Eventually, Christou (who might actually be sensing something) ends up projectile vomiting blood over Haig before he is taken off to get medical attention, making way for the evening's main attraction.

Then  the show (and film) introduces us to young Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), who was rescued from a brutal Satanic cult (who all, otherwise, died by fire rather than allow the FBI to take them in). Her saviour was parapsychologist author June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon), who became the girl's guardian and then started working with her, trying to understand if she really was possessed by a supernatural entity.

From the get-go, Lilly is a demonic Jan Brady with a dead-eyed thousand yard stare, but once June reluctantly calls forth whatever is inside the young girl - she refers to it as Mr Wiggles - her transformation is terrifying and impressive.

Even amongst an impressive line-up of older actors, Torelli gives a bravura performance as the centre of attention, who manages to be nightmarishly creepy even when seemingly trying to be nice and not channelling dark forces from the great beyond. 

Dark secrets are laid bare, convictions are challenged, people die graphic deaths, and general shenanigans ensue.

The build-up, and pacing, directed by Cameron and Colin Cairnes from their own script, is methodical and steady, giving the gradual of collapse of the Night Owls talk show into chaos and carnage a genuine sense of believability.

Perhaps this really is recently unearthed footage from a legendary episode of American '70s late night talk show folklore...

This is the stuff creepypasta and urban legends are born out of.

Kind of aiming for similar territory as our Ghostwatch (with a liberal dash of The Exorcist), Late Night With The Devil does a spectacular job of maintaining verisimilitude while seeding clues through its simple and straightforward storyline, right up until the end.

It just fails to stick the landing by seemingly breaking its format to peel back the curtain for anyone who hadn't already twigged why everything was happening.

Maybe a documentary bookend, akin to the opening of the film, digging more into Jack's background might been better, but then again the repeated image of Jack shouting into the camera "turn off your television" is still very striking (and very Invasion of The Body Snatchers).

I guess it could be classed as found footage, but don't be put off by that, this isn't hours of shaky cam as teenagers run through woods in the middle of the night, this has higher aspirations than that.

In truth, while "found footage" can be more miss than hit with me, I do have a particular soft spot for this story format sub-genre, the mockumentary presenting something supernatural as if it were real, especially when they are done well - which Late Night With The Devil is (barring that one niggle of mine).

THROWBACK THURSDAY: Real Life Ghostbustin'

Filmed in the middle of the night on a "nanny cam" in our old house (in late September, 2015), I've kept this quiet (only Paul has previously seen it) until now because I know this kind of thing can freak Rachel out. 

 

A couple of seconds in, you can see an "orb" of some description fly from the top of the screen towards our old TV (on the right). 

It appears to hit the TV and ricochet off towards the bottom of the picture. 

I'm not saying it's a ghost (it's way more likely to be a dust mote... as they really exist) - but it's easy to see how these things can be construed as "supernatural" by those who want them to be. 

So, yes, our old house was probably haunted!

HALLOWEEN HORROR: Aquarium of The Dead (2021)

Aquarium of The Dead (which I only just discovered was a sequel to Zoombies) sees a batch of infected animal vaccinations turning a random selection of creatures at a sea-life centre (from star fish to a giant octopi, giant crabs to a single dolphin) into man-eating monsters. 

While the film looks half-decent, it is undermined by awful acting, a lame script, continuity errors, a surfeit of two-dimensional characters who add nothing to the mix, and just a shit-ton of stupid.

To give it its due, the film tries to add depth - particularly in the sub-plot of how the contaminated vaccines got into the creatures in the first place - but there's no rhyme nor reason to how this virus spreads and what affect it has on the creatures.

Even by Asylum standards, Aquarium of The Dead leaves a lot to be desired and this can be put down almost entirely to the script and editing.

Bad acting can be humorous, but an illogical, inconsistent narrative - that doesn't so much as come to a climax as it just stops - is pretty inexcusable when it could have been pared down to something far simpler.

HALLOWEEN HORROR: The Wicker Man (1973)

To balance up the sins of that awful Nic Cage rehash, I thought this was as good a time as any to revisit the peerless 1973 original of The Wicker Man.

Dour, puritanical, West Highland Police sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward) receives an anonymous letter, telling him about the case of a missing girl - Rowan Morrison.

She was supposed to have disappeared on the secluded Summerisle, a remote Hebridean island famed for its popular and unusually abundant fruit produce.

However, when he arrives there, the islanders claim never to have heard of the girl. Even the woman Howie believes is her mother, post mistress May Morrison (Irene Sunter), denies that she's her daughter.

Realising that this investigation isn't going to be an open-and-shut case, Howie takes a room at the island's Green Man Inn, where he meets the landlord's lovely daughter, Willow (Britt Ekland, dubbed by Annie Ross).

Struggling to come to terms with the girl's disappearance evolving into a question of semantics, humourless Howie of the 'fun police' grows increasingly frustrated with the islanders' pagan ways of public nudity, dogging, fertility rituals, singing (there's so many songs in The Wicker Man it could be classed as a musical), dancing etc.

Finding a grave for the missing girl, Howie gains permission from the island's head honcho, the charismatic Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee), to exhume her body... only to find that Rowan's coffin doesn't contain her body.

As May Day draws near, Howie begins to suspect that Rowan isn't really dead, but being held hostage to be used in a pagan sacrifice to ensure that the island's crops don't fail as they did the year before.

Of course, we all know that the machinations of the islanders are far more sinister than that, leading to the classic - and well-known - climax (that doesn't involve bees).

It was my late father who introduced me to The Wicker Man and therefore it has always held a special significance for me.

I watched the director's cut, which had been shown on Film 4, so it had all the bits that had been cut out of the original release (just in lower quality, which is a shame because it makes those scenes draw attention to themselves for the wrong reasons).

Surely, there must be technology now that could restore these low-quality scenes to the standard of the rest of the film? That would be worth sacrificing a few virgins for, right?

It's been too long since I've seen The Wicker Man, despite it being one of my favourite movies (not just in this genre, but of all-time), and I was reminded just how many moments were lifted from it for the more recent remake... and yet that still managed to get so much wrong.

Not a scary horror per se, The Wicker Man is disorientating and unnerving, and its very lack of overt supernatural elements gives it a terrifying verisimilitude that makes you wonder if perhaps such events could still occur in modern times.

And it's always worth being reminded of this:

HALLOWEEN HORROR: Zoombies (2016)

When a strange virus quickly spreads through a safari park and turns all the zoo animals undead, those left in the park must stop the creatures before they escape and zombify the whole city.

While it's doubtful this will spawn a franchise like Sharknado (that's a special kind of lightning you can't catch in a bottle twice), The Asylum's Zoombies had the potential, on paper, to be another cult classic.

The Eden Wildlife Park is about reopen after a major upgrade, to turn it into a family-friendly visitor attraction, when several capuchin monkeys are brought to the veterinary unit, exhibiting signs of an unknown virus.

Attempts to find out what's wrong with one of them results in its death and then immediate return to life as a zombie-monkey, which promptly kills the vets and infects its kin.

The monkeys escape, and soon all the animals in the zoo are turning into vicious undead monsters, as the few staff on duty - and a coachload of new interns - struggle to prevent the infection from spreading outside the park.

I appreciated the fact that there's no hanging around with Zoombies. It opens with a television advert for the park, and then the infected monkey shows up and all hell breaks loose. And all that's even before the opening credits.

The film is part Zoo (the TV series where the animals of world turn on mankind), with a dash of Jurassic Park, all mixed in with horror movie-standard zombies (even though, for a change, these can't spread their zombie infection to humans).

Unfortunately as the virus spreads and more, and larger, animals become infected, the story becomes increasing preposterous and ill thought out, the acting takes a hit, and the special effects deteriorate (particularly memorable examples being the fuzzy-edged CGI elephants and the least convincing zip line experience in cinema history).

Elements that would be seen as foreshadowing in a regular film - such as the bond zoo owner Dr. Ellen Rogers' (Kim Nielsen) young daughter, Thea (La La Nestor) has with the gorilla Kifo (played by Ivan Djurovic in a great ape suit), or lead character Lizzy's (Ione Butler) backstory about why she got into working as a security guard - turned out to have no bearing on the plot of Zoombies.

For the first half-hour or so, I had high hopes. This movie was never going to win any awards, but the core idea was intriguing, the set-up was good, and even the majority of zombie creatures were pretty decent (and I didn't even mind that Kifo was obviously a bloke in a furry suit).

Sadly, as the film progressed, I kind of got the impression that all the effort had gone into front-loading the story and no one had really thought out a convincing ending.

There are moments when Zoombies hits that "so bad it's good" sweet spot, but disappointingly not as many as I was hoping for from the previews (see above).

HALLOWEEN HORROR: The Wicker Man (2006)

To quote the late, great Edward Woodward from the original Wicker Man:

What have I just watched?

I'm not sure what made Neil LaBute think he could - and should - remake The Wicker Man, one of the finest rural horror movies ever captured on film, or why he thought Nic Cage would make the perfect stand in for Edward Woodward.

Now, I'm a big fan of Cage, particularly when he's allowed to go completely off the hook (cf. Mandy), but in this unnecessary reboot he's kept too restrained and uptight, almost constipated, as the bee-allergic Edward Malus.

A former motorcycle cop, coping with PTSD after he failed to save a young woman and her daughter from a car fire, Edward receives a mysterious letter (hand written with a wax seal and no stamp - so, not strange at all in this day and age) from his ex-fiancée, Willow Woodward (Kate Beahan), telling him that her daughter has gone missing.

Willow's back living on the secluded, private island where she was raised, which, when he gets there, Edward discovers is a farming commune, a matriarchal cult led by the enigmatic Sister SummersIsle (Ellen Burstyn).

Except for Willow, the islanders aren't pleased to see Edward or help him in his investigations, claiming either that Willow's daughter, Rowan (Erika-Shaye Gair), never existed or died in a tragic accident.

Learning that the island is also home to many, many bee hives, Edward gets the general runaround, being led a merry - and totally random - dance by the natives, until the inevitable Wicker Man climax of the piece.

This will come as absolutely no surprise to anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the original (which, like the chestburster in Alien, has become a pop culture meme that reaches way beyond geeks and horror movie buffs).

The use of papyrus font in the opening credits didn't bode well, but I was determined to grin and bear it, to see if this version of The Wicker Man was truly as awful as everyone said.

Honestly, there could have been a half-decent horror film in the bones of LaBute's Wicker Man, if he had had the courage to make it its own thing and shed the allusions to the peerless original.

As it stands, it brings nothing new to the party and elements like the "Easter Egg" of Edward's first name and Willow's surname just come across as a bit crass and heavy-handed (like a big sign saying "oooh, aren't we clever?").

The weirdness of the islanders is so arch and on-the-nose that it's as if Edward has landed  somewhere between The League Of Gentlemen's Royston Vasey and Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, an over-the-top parody rather than a serious attempt to replicate the unnerving and atmospheric horror of the original Summerisle.

The pacing is plodding and pedestrian to begin with, interlaced with some hilariously awful dialogue, as evidenced in the truly bizarre "oh god, not the bees" scene.

And the fact that the film requires an epic infodump in the final sequence to explain to Edward what's happening was the icing on a particularly drab cake.

HALLOWEEN HORROR: The Call of Cthulhu (2005)

 

"... some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

- HP Lovecraft 

Filmed as an authentic, 1920's black and white, silent movie, The Call of Cthulhu is an amazing 47-minute piece of work, perfectly encapsulating the psychological horror of H.P. Lovecraft's iconic story.

Styling it as a movie that Lovecraft himself might have seen in the 1920s is a stroke of genius by the filmmakers of the HP Lovecraft Historical Society, as it allows for considerable leeway when it comes to the necessary effects required to bring the Great Cthulhu - and his island home of R'lyeh - to life.

The story itself is a puzzle box, an onion of layers upon layers, beginning with a man (Matt Foyer) in an asylum recounting to his doctor (John Bolen), how he was charged with sorting out the affairs of his great-uncle, Professor Angell (Ralph Lucas), upon the old man's death.

Going through the professor's papers, the man comes across a particular box of papers and files, and as he reads these we are taken back to a series of seemingly disconnected events, from the lucid dreams of artist Henry Wilcox (Chad Fifer), via a raid by New Orleans police on a savage swamp cult, and the discovery of a drifting ship with only a single survivor onboard.

We learn about the cult's worship of alien beings, Elder Gods, who are sleeping under the sea, waiting for the "stars to align", so they can awaken again, but little else to tie things together.

Later the man - having put his concerns about his uncle's affairs to one side - stumbles across further details of the mysterious ship, which sends him on a global hunt for the elusive final pieces of the puzzle.

Eventually, he arrives in Oslo and is handed the personal account of the ship's lone survivor.

This details the discovery of a strange island, where the crew disturb the resting place of the monstrous alien god Cthulhu. 

Structured as stories-within-stories-within-stories, as characters recount events in which further characters recount other events, helps accentuate the disorientating, dream-like nature of the whole affair.

Which may well just be the ramblings of a mad man.

However, clues are slowly pieced together from different events to formulate a possibly complete picture of what links all these disparate tales... and what it means for the future of humanity.

I've been reading Lovecraft since I was about 12, so am probably biased, but I love this film and treasure my old DVD of it, for all its authentic, creaky, mannered staging.

By sticking close to the original text, the combination of Sean Branney's script and Andrew Leman's direction, within the self-imposed constraints of vintage filmmaking, make Call of Cthulhu one of the best, pure, Lovecraftian adaptations.

It isn't about gore and jump scares, the horror comes from the larger scale suggestion of what the narrative implies.

HALLOWEEN HORROR: Willy's Wonderland (2021)

A nameless, eccentric, taciturn drifter (Nicolas Cage) finds himself stranded in an isolated town, and the only way he can get the cash to pay for his car repairs is by spending the night cleaning the town's derelict roadside attraction, Willy's Wonderland.

Of course, it turns out that there's a catch... of the supernatural kind.

The animatronic creatures of Willy's Wonderland not only come to life after dark, but are hungry.

There are two major factors immediately in Willy's Wonderland's favour: firstly, is there, really, such a thing as a bad Nic Cage movie (The Wicker Man aside, but that's a whole 'nother conversation)?

And, secondly, any film that plays out with Free Bird scores well with me.

However, ultimately, Willy's Wonderland feels like a movie where the idea was better on paper than in its execution.

Cage playing a character that doesn't say a word is an inspired choice, but his performance is surprisingly restrained. 

Even though there's plenty of violent fight scenes, as well as possibly too many of him playing pinball, he lacks the expected memorable physicality of, say, Sailor Ripley from Wild at Heart.

And the plot, itself, isn't really anything that new.

Both the "town that has made a deal with the Devil" and the "murderous animatronics" are well-known horror movie tropes, but Willy's Wonderland plays them both at face value and doesn't do anything that unique or inventive with them.

The backstory to the events that unfold is gruesomely fascinating and there's a definite consistent verisimilitude about the townsfolk and the bargain they have entered into to protect their own, but I kept hoping for more.

Just off the top of my head, on the animatronic side alone, Willy's Wonderland is Child's Play writ large, mashed up with Five Nights At Freddy's, and The Banana Splits Movie.

The 'serial killer cult' (shades of The Following) was a nice touch, but then the lack of distinctly different personalities within that felt like a missed opportunity.

Cage's silence allowed locals to drop exposition on him - and us - quite convincingly. 

However, several of his character's quirks, such as his regular break schedule (whatever else was going on) are left unexplained, almost to the extent of suggesting his character is a blank slate that simply acts as the story demands... kind of like an animatronic amusement park mascot!

Enjoyable nonsense while it's on, Willy's Wonderland isn't a film that's going to be bothering anyone's Top Ten Favourite Horror Movie lists, but is silly enough for a fun, brain-in-neutral, beer-and-pizza film night viewing experience.