Hauntology for a De-New America!

The rise of the retro-analog synth soundtrack in recent horror and science fiction films--both in and out of the mainstream--has brought us into a weird wondrous future alternate reality where perhaps, ideally, orchestral scores will cease being produced. Maybe it's a question of listener age; if you were an impressionable American or British child in 70s, growing up watching "film strips," and 16mm bus accident and environmentalist sci-fi shorts in elementary school, UFO documentaries and PBS sci-fi trips like LATHE OF HEAVEN and STAR MAIDENS at home with the parents, then the Moog-y sounds of yesterday's future is now like the mystery of death and eternity tied into some deeper-than-nostalgic tugging, like a rope you're following through the Thing whiteout Arctic storm.

The rope through the whiteout itself is just white noise --it's where it leads you that counts. You may not get there, but you 'get' there's no 'there' to get to anyway, and that's better than either here or 'there' ever could be.

That said, even in the whiteout there are so many tangled and crossed guide ropes you could get lost right quick without the right guide. Pay me five teen dolor and I'll take you to hear Simon Reynolds, Mark Fisher, and Ghost Box (in addition to grandpa of the movement, Boards of Canada). Join us in savoring this moment of clarity, when we finally remember that we've forgotten the present, wherein we finally 'feel' that nostalgia and the endless proliferation of media have made the present impossible. For in the face of so much immediate, accessible (digitized / searchable) past, the 'now' dries up like a lake spread out along an endless expanse of desert flatland that grows out by a mile for every inch you traverse.

"Now," Much of our 'leisure time' is now spent either shopping for, or cueing up, the next experience of the past. The rest of the time were immersed in these past haunted worlds, now curated by ourselves; we've become our own radio station's sole programmers. It's great. All we've lost is limitation.

If you need a working definition of hauntology, Reynolds rounds up some writers to sum up the its sound. Starting with Matthew Ingram at The Wire ("memory is a theoretical portal to the phantasmal kingdom, not a trivial exercise in retro-stylistics") and ends up with Dickens and then W.S. Merwin ("Tell me what you see vanishing and I / Will tell you who you are") and it all makes frickin' beautiful eloquent sense.

As I've said (but forgotten), I found this world because I love BOC and I love John Carpenter and thanks to Netflix showing me The Machine and Beyond the Black Rainbow, I finally realized part of the reason why. I was like oh wow, I love these movies, but 50% of that love comes solely from their pulsing analog retro-futurist scores, both of which are on Spotify. From there, the Moog crumb trail widened deeper into the black forest of retro-futurist analog sci-fi TV and the 70s cryptozoological funk of Goblin, which in turn lead me unto Ghost Box, Scarfolk Council, and now Simon Reynolds and Ghost of my Life author Mark Fisher, who repurposed Derrida's original (Communist/spectral) meaning towards haunted music, via his childhood spent attuned to the quietly forward-thinking ur-electronica of BBC's Radiophonic Orchestra. Since England's never fully bowed their TV channels to the LCD monetizing (Graham Norton excepted), or had to appease red state Christian sponsors, the BBC of the 70s was deep and proudly into the occult, leading a whole generation of future artists to the reins of the new decade, in ways we in the US lost when videotape erased the mystery from media through the very act of preserving it and public school ceased running 16mm films in favor or streaky VHS tapes.

For me, the discovery of this eerie retrofuturistical nostalgia began with Boards of Canada's Music has the Right to Children in 1998 and then Zombi's Cosmos in 2003. Since this stuff was all on CD, the warm pulsing sound of analog was the first time doubly ghosted and like a double negative became positive. The past sounded warmer and more organic, even more futuristic, than the immediate present. 

That's hauntology in a nutshell, and I'm hooked... at least until November, when those loathsome orchestras will inevitably return right as night starts lurching its way forward, sooner and sooner, snaking  across the stand-still city like a rope of sweaty reflective mylar-enshrouded woe through the wall-to-wall white of orchestral all-access blizzarding.

Here's my #1 of two Spotify lists:
Heirs of Goblin Carpenter



And now here's some of the more noteworthy soundtracks and soundtrack-ish works.
DESICCATED SWIMMING AREA:

THE NICK (OST)
Cliff Martinez (2014)
Soderbergh's Cinemax series set in turn of the century surgery at the Knickerbocker Hospital would be a bore if the score was in the hands of an orchestral windbag like Howard Shore or John Williams, but Martinez realizes the power of hauntology at its fullest - not the actual past music (which was after all, trying to evoke its own past), but the retro-futurist music of remembering the past, or envisioning brutal operations under primitive instruments, patients still screaming through the long disused machinery, the amniotic pulse of analog which now seems so welcomingly inhuman in our overly human age that we cling to it like we would a churning life raft in a brutally tranquil sea.

LOST THEMES
John Carpenter(2015)

He's not the visionary filmmaker he once was but Lost Themes lets fans of the master know he's still got the gift of making superbly creepy synth-based music. Each track on here could well be the theme song from a classic early 80s or late 70s opus like Assault on Precinct 13 or Escape from New York, and whatever autumnal sights or sounds you see or are thoughts thinking while listening to JC's masterful mix of piano, electric guitar and analog synths are suddenly fraught with a sudden Panavision ominousness.

PROPHECY OF THE BLACK WIDOW
Umberto (2010)

Steve Moore's big band going for that Goblin-Carpenter vibe with an intensely percussive and bizarro rock 80s synthesizer twist, NNF calls it "electro-satanic Goblin worship."

BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW
Sinoa Caves (2014)
For when your floating down the street at dawn, chased in slow motion by your own shadow looming 60 feet tall and with burning coal eyes or are tripping your face off at an airport, part György Ligeti from THE SHINING and part Claudio Simonetti from TENEBRE.

YELLOW (OST)
Antoni Maiovvi (2013) 
Musik for remembering what it felt like as a 16 year-old driving home at night in the rain after seeing The Terminator at an empty theater in Woodbridge, NJ. As we learn in all the great writing on hauntology, that's what the uncanny frisson memory of the mediated grave robbers from outer space medias are for. Maiovvi's soundtrack is for a 'neo-giallo' short film set in Berlin. I'll probably never see it, but I do like the soundtrack.

BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO (OST)
Broadcast (2013)

Formerly a late-to-the-trip hop female fronted kind of Stereolab-Combustible Edison hybrid, Broadcast were nothing if not classy, cocktail retro swing-ready, and a touch derivative. Turns out they were just waiting for the 70s BBC ghost documentary childhood analog synth reverie to kick in to become the sickly and glow-in-the dark poster child for the hauntology movement via this merge with amniotic Focus Group. There's presumably some real occult documentary voiceover buried somewhere in this ominous, but always playful mix of tape loops, effect, and poppy little stabs; "the bee colony" is a classic example of their rare ability to bring in vocals without breaking the mood.

COSMOS 
Zombi (2004) 

In the beginning, as far as this futurist giallo nostalgia went, there was just this bass and drums duo with an intensely percussive and bizarro world synthesizer twist. They've gone on to deliver great neo-giallo work that would be perfect on any Argento or Fulci film from 1971-82.

FROM OUT HERE
Advisory Circle (2014)

However you got here, this is where to stay, if  you're me, perusing the Ghost Box catalog, The Belbury Poly can get too upbeat, other acts too newsreel sample crazed but Advisory Circle never waver from the straight up 70s synth analog spookiness. "The Ghost Box aesthetic has expanded beyond spooky public information films full of roll necks and bowl cuts to something involving sharper cheekbones and haircuts. Their palette seems to shift from faded film oranges and browns to black." - Wire (B. Coley 7/15) so true, Wire.

IT FOLLOWS (OST)
Disasterpiece (2014)
From the very first notes of the very first shot, you just know, things are never going to be the same old concept of old sameness again.

COLD IN JULY (OST)

Jeff Grace (2014)
".... while tipping its hat to John Carpenter [it] moves beyond mere cloning of ones influences. Jeff Grace feels like a real contender for the electronic score crown. Cold In July is undeniably a post millennial classic synth soundtrack that makes the terrific and very enjoyable music of Umberto, Zombi, Salisbury & Barrow feel like mere fanboys playing at wanting to be their heroes Moroder, Goblin, Tangerine Dream etc [...] Somehow he puts new textures into the atmospheres of these tracks and adds a new level of sophistication to synth scoring." (Space Debris - Cardrossmaniac)

UNTIL SILENCE
Roll the Dice (2014)
Third studio album from the Swedish electronic duo with a history of Swedish TV scoring and DJ circuit touring though their forte is clearly an ominous analog horror-ready cinematic boom just perfect for walking briskly through the park while being shadowed by (or walking) a big black dog. (pick track; "Blood in Blood Out" - with its ominous thudding bass note piano keys banging ominously over a morse code echo and rising under current it's as if Carpenter's Halloween score had a moody son who was growing slowly with every three chord return into a gigantic mutant/

THE MACHINE (OST)
Tom Raybould (2010)

Dig these bizarro retro phat synth paranoid scores: Rayboulds is somewhere between Vangelis for BLADE RUNNER, John Carpenter for ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and Tangerine Dream for SORCERER, and the perfect wallpaper for a crisp fall afternoon wandering through a dying landscape.

CUB (OST)

Steve Moore (2015)
"Cub is a retro-synth soundtrack that's so good it doesn't need to pretend it's anything new. This score is the sound of a man and his synthesiser creating fabulous minimal and spooky analogue sounds not unlike John Carpenter whereas Zombi were more like your full on horror prog rock group along the lines of Tangerine Dream or Goblin." (Space Debris)

Sleep Games -- Pye Corner Audio

Dead Air - Mordant Music

Room 237  (OST) - Jonathan Snypes & William Hutson

Access and Amplify - The Brain

From the Grave - Umberto

Brainstorm - Steve Moore, Majeure

Night Drive - Chromatics

Hic Stunt Leones - Alessandro Parissi

Belbury Tales - Belbury Poly

Drokk - Geoff Barrow, Ben Salisbury

Only God Forgives (OST) - Cliff Martinez

Polygon Mountain - Ubre Blanca

Ga'an - Ga'an

Solar Maximum - Majeure

Unicornography - The Focus Group

Psychical - Ensemble Economique

FURTHANCE:

And when in England visit lovely:

Scarfolk

and also lovely Clinkskell

This 2012 clinkety-clink riveter from Boing Boing pen plinketer Mark Pilkington explores muchly the fiction and authorial booky wook aspect: "Hauntologists mine the past for music's future."
--

And this quintessential post from Rouge's Foam scribe Adam Harper, explores a wide range of music, film, and art: Hauntology: the Past Inside the Present. 

Hard to believe it's from 2009. Were was I all this time? Ah, what a loaded question.



--



HAUNTOLOGY FOR A RED OCTOBER



JULIAN HOUSE (Design/Videos)

  A FIELD IN ENGLAND (2013)

POST SCRIPT:
And then Shout Factory debuts this the same week I'm writing this post... It's cometh. Who says America's behind the screens when it comes to hauntological excavastalgia?

It's a Carpenter Hush: SOLE SURVIVOR, IT FOLLOWS

I love the ominousness of October, the seasonal gloom wiping the world away with a deep HD black eraser, saving me for last, pale in the TV reflection. Hurrying like a napping sunbather woken by the first cool breeze of evening; relentless the tick-tock approach of Halloween, as if the entire month was rolled up into a cone, draining the hours like peanut M&Ms. Neighbors in the distance raking leaves take on a sinister shadowy shimmer in the dimming day and the black decorative window shutters of suburban houses seem like cartoon eyebrows fronting a devil's skull. House interiors become extra dark as increasingly early twilight tricks us into into not turning on the table lamps til after the deadly vapors have infiltrated. Pumpkins and wood panelling, orange shag rug and black witch hats, talking low and quiet to as not wake the sleeping behemoth in the basement: I love when eerie horror movies capture all that. If they can find the ambiguity in autumn leaves swirling around under gnarled bare trunks in the Magic Hour +1, I am theirs. So few movies get that feeling right, that mood of giddy doom, the inexorable looming.

Halloween (watching The Thing)

It Follows (watching Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women)
Note: black and white TV atop dead floor console -like we had in the early 80s

Carpenter's original Halloween (1978) most assuredly captured it, maybe even defined it, the uncanny suburban home familiarity of being creeped out alone in the house with just a distracted babysitter who tries but can't keep the nervous trill out of her voice when you all hear a strange noise upstairs. Even though it's probably nothing, she'll... take the fire poker with her before she goes up to --- no on second thought she won't go upstairs. She's sure it was nothing. The kids watching old horror movies on TV more for comfort and protection from bigger scares, like a fading camp fire keeping the wolves at bay.

SOLE SURVIVOR 

(1983) Dir. Thom Eberhardt

***1/2

In the annals of the modern horror/sci fi genre auteurs there are recognizable names (Argento, Craven, Carpenter), up and comers (West, Fessenden, Wingard) and then... well... no one. But with DVD making it impossible for them to fully disappear, also-ran auteurs--those who only made one or two genius films, are ready to be exhumed and dusted: Herk Harvey and his unconscious poetics (Carnival of Souls); Michael Almereyda's double mid-90s dip into reflexive homage (The Eternal, Nadja); and Thom Eberhardt, who made two 80s sleepers that have stood the test of time: 1984's Night of the Comet, and q 1983 bit of crafty low budget bit of Final Destination-in theme / Fog in moody Carpenter vibe ominousness called Sole Survivor.  

After a schismatic opening with some psychic TV actress (Caren Larkey, who also co-produced) on the phone trying to find out about a plane crash she just dreamt of, we have the heroine Denise or "Dee Dee" (Anita Skinner) sitting in her plan passenger seat (in the upright position) amidst the best looking plane wreckage a low budget film allows. The sole survivor of a terrible plane crash, she's lucky to be alive, the handsome young doctor assures her. But something's not right and beginning with her release from the hospital the recently dead seem to be following her around, or maybe it's that she's mixing alcohol with her discontinued antidepressants.

ask not for whom, kitty-kitty

The dead are moodily presented, but all in all it's more the clever masterful use of Carpenter-esque momentum, 70s sexual casualness and the sense of being alone in a world slowly disappearing around you as night falls, that works to make it such a precious October find. Weird shots of Denise's empty kitchen, living room, stairs, 70s faux exposed brick and panelling and deep red walls, only the cat's yes and tail moving (left), but something there - just by seeing it, we're bringing some 'seer' into the house.

What I like too is the Hawksian pro-feminist assertiveness in the warm romantic exposition with her cute doctor, Brian (Kurt Johnson) who worries she's suffering from 'survivor's syndrome', or at least that's his excuse to call her up. In a cool little scene we see their back and forth phone conversation, the way she moves to the bedroom phone to lie down, canary-swallowing grin on her face, as she prepares to focus in on her seductive phone stratagem. She's confident and in charge, unafraid to tell the man she's seducing "I'm nine months older than you!" Alternating shots of her in bed on the phone and he at his kitchen making sauce or something are very well done. And then the camera becomes like that friend who, once they sense their pal has it in the bag, as it were, gives them a quiet congratulatory smile and heads downstairs to get a drink or something.

But the thing is there's nobody there, and the stillness is broken only by the roving eyes of the pink cat clock.

It Follows (my clock radio at middle right)

DeDee also has the exact 70s clock radio I had as a kid (from which I listened to The Shadow and Suspense reruns every night on local PBS radio) and which is also in It Follows. A dripping faucet, and a pre-Twin Peaks realization that nothing is more profoundly creepy than a traffic light in the dead of night, still changing from green to yellow to red, even though there are no cars in sight. (Was that poetry?) During the long nights, the ominousness of the action shuffles back and forth between Denise's house and Cristy's (Robin Davidson) house next door --where Deedee presumably babysat Cristy when a lot younger and now they're just kind of neighbor/pals.

 Both houses are great relics of the 70s style, very cozy, with all the exposed faux stone and dark wood panelling, the deep reds and dark oranges shag carpets and walls offsetting Denise's red hair and blue vein pale skin look. I can relate to hanging out with younger people; going over and drinking Cristy's parents' booze and falling asleep on their couch while she sneaks off to a party, because you're too squirrelly to be home alone -- another uniquely real relationship in this quietly amazing low budget little film. We never actually see either of Cristy's parents, either, another eerie similarity with our next film.

As with Carpenter's best early work, it's all very Howard Hawks right down to two lines of dialogue lifted wholesale (along with her hip beret) from To Have and Have Not: "it's even better when you help" and later Cristy's "what are you trying to do, guess her weight?" at a strip poker game (with a special early appearance by future scream queen Brinke Stevens)--indicating the two may have seen the film together one night earlier. The strip poker game isn't in It Follows or Carnival of Souls, the two films that sort if act as intertextual timeline bookends to this one (more so than, say Final Destination) but that they follow similar courses illustrates the potency of the pattern, one borne I'm sure in old horror pulp stories or Twilight Zone style twists, though this in its elemental mix-and-match has something you won't see anywhere else, an undead gun usage.

"read the label - maybe you'll believe me then"

Hey, it doesn't have to break new ground, as long as it does what it does with a certain amount of atmosphere and taste -- big rarities in horror films of any time frame, let alone the early 80s. Dee-Dee and Brian's budding pair bonding and her cool Cristy relationship are both very well etched in a very short time.  And with all that evocative 70s dusky decor and the hushed October magic hour mood, as far as I'm concerned the film doesn't even need to go anywhere to become one of my favorite 80s horror movie discoveries. There might be Xmas trees lurking in the corners of rooms but hey-it's California so it doesn't matter--there's an autumnal vibe that makes each formed or renewed bond, each drink and playful touch feel precious with fading warmth, fires all the warmer and brighter for the encroaching darkness.

And above all what makes this such a gem is the confident of Eberhardt's vision. Hindsight is everything, and between this and Night of the Comet he could surely have been a horror auteur like Carpenter or Stuart Gordon if he cared to.

Instead... well, he made Captain Ron. 

Eddie was a good man on a boat once.

IT FOLLOWS
(2015) Dir. David Robert Mitchell

****

I used to wonder why filmmakers didn't do more adapting from the golden book of universal childhood nightmares -- the ones we all remember but usually move past once we learn the 'turn and face your fear rather than trying to run' trick. Until then, the terrible powerlessness we feel as young asleep post-infants, bodies still hungering for the sense of safety we used to feel sleeping with our parents, translating into nightmares of trying to escape relentlessly approaching figures only we could see -- the adults around us ignoring our pleas for help, like they could see neither us nor our pursuer;  stuck in a slow motion drag as we try to run away, the monster slowly advancing. For me it was an old woman, evil eyes, hunched over and staring right at me and smiling laughing but making no sound and extending her hands towards me as she tottered closer, not unlike a clothed version of the crone in The Shining's room 237.

Such an image, that slowly pursuing creature is at the core of horror, yet very seldom used to the full uncanny shiver extent we find in It Follows. In the Universal days there was the Mummy--not the Karloff original (we never saw him shamble in his wrappings), but the Chaney sequels where he stayed in his bandages and lumbered slowly but relentlessly forward, mute and easily outpaced, yet--like the tortoise vs. the hare, bound to catch up to you through sheer relentless, unstoppable, methodical forward shambling. The 'Shape' as Michael Myers was billed in Carpenter's Halloween, was this nightmare figure's ultimate modern expression... until now. Even the immortal Michael Myers is outgunned for raw uncanny primordial dread by the 'thing' in It Follows. For this and countless other reasons, I might go on a limb and say It Follows is the greatest horror movie ever made, certainly one of my top ten favorites if not the favorite (we'll have to see how it ages over time). It is beautiful to look at, eloquent, sweet, and true even as it floats deep into a reverie that fully captures the mortal dread that sexual awakening brings with it like an inescapable shadow. Set in a middle class suburbia outside abandoned Detroit. It's a world where the sweet shyness of late afternoon plummets into the sweet nighttime of adulthood's sexual jolts; in a flash we're exposed to the evil sickening core of life, the eternal footman's snicker like a 'test positive for STD' report; and a closed community center pool in a rain storm conjures Corman Poe mattes.

I'll forgive Mitchell's film any dream logic inconsistency for here is a movie that distills the purity of October, of teenage angst, the side effects of seasonal change, of the inevitability of not just old age and death, the husk of a dead city after even the crime has gone, the horror of public nudity and the oblivious crowd.  Alone amongst all horror filmmakers (Kubrick, Polanski aside), Mitchell realizes the shocking power of old people in hospital gowns, and of nudity--as terrifying as anything ever conceived of by any modern horror auteur.

“I am Lazarus, come from the dead..."

One of the insidious aspects of this killer is its ability to assume the shape of its past victims: thus we see, in prime STD warning film style, the way unprotected sex means exposure to the germs of a whole vast capillary system of past lovers of lovers, stretching back to now elderly old lechers. This is the unspoken question hovering over the nudity we see too, implies some kind of past victim catalog as well as of lover, the curse's sexual history and possible origin, like the drowned obscene often naked forms the thing adopts, moms with breasts exposed, sopping wet girls peeing themselves, old men on roofs, (did some skeevy carrier temporarily shed the stalker by balling his comatose mom's hospital roommate?). The idea that only the victim can see these images, evokes the uncanny suburban nudity of Eric Fischl's paintings (below), wherein everyday suburban Americana is rendered instantaneously perverse, hostile, uncanny. 

This uncanny element mirrors too way American auto manufacturing has been abandoned and left to wither where it fell like a dead tree, and the way an enterprising Michigan filmmaker like Mitchell might utilize the city's abandoned look as effectively as the Italian neo-realists used the bombed-out Roman streets in the late 40s. Some maybe nods to modern J-Horror with darkened eyes and hissing and people getting yanked off their feet aren't as successful (too obvious). But with its subtly disturbing scenes of sexual display, the sick flash of what Todd McGowan might call the traumatic real, or at any rate, the signifier of the gaze, we have something truly worthy of the Freudian defintion of uncanny. In itself alone, that's more precious than gold.

HOW "THE FANTASY SCREEN BREAKS DOWN"

Blue Velvet (naked figure middle left background) / compare w/below from It Follows

"[Dorothy in Blue Velvet] seems to appear out of thin air, appearing at first as indecipherable blot that no one--including the spectator--initially notices. When the other characters do notice, they become completely disoriented. Her intrusion into the fantasmatic realm rips apart the fantasy structure.... Her body has no place in the fantasmatic public world, and the fantasy screen breaks down... She doesn't fit in the picture, which is why we become so uncomfortable watching her naked body in the middle of a suburban neighborhood" (McGowan, The Impossible David Lynch, p. 106-7)

It Follows

The Shining (my infinite trans-time-space collage version)

Eric Fischl - Birth of Love (2nd Version)

But there are other rare riches here too: I love how the kids choke slightly when they talk, confident in themselves, but still coltish with their adult voices, as if trying to reign and shape some kind of limitless volume. I relate hugely. These kids are on the sweet side of teenagerdom, the not the strident grating character played by PJ Soles (not that she's not great and perfect for the film and the era) in Halloween or the general volume of obnoxious waggery in a film like Scream. Rather is an awareness of the gorgeous magic that happens when a cute girl everyone kind of crushes on isn't a bitch, but is also nice, like Jay (Maika Monroe) is to little sister Kelly (Lili Serpe) and her bookish pals Annie (Bailey Spry) and Paul (Kier Gilchrist). It's that sweetness that makes it understandable they all want to help her, for when pretty girls who are nice to their little sister and her friends and the other kids in the neighborhood, the result is like a reassuring lantern in the darkness, a Guinevere to unite Camelot, evoking the bond between Curtis and her babysitting charges in Halloween; Curtis and Tom Atkins in The Fog; or Mike and older brother Jody and pal Reggie in Phantasm) (and most recently in my docket, Dee Dee and her neighbor in Sole Survivor -above)

A key aspect too, in my mind, is the use of old black-and-white horror films on local TV as a kind of modern equivalent to a protective fire. Those of us who were kids in the 70s certainly remember staying up all night watching old black and white films on local TV (I recognized the two films Paul has on: Killers from Space and Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women), and how it paradoxically lessened our fear, and it's the familiarity of the set-up that makes the use of TV monster movies so unforgettable and meta-creepy real in Halloween and (more overtly) Scream. 

Jay's constantly exposed cute legs represent a more socially acceptable form of the grotesque nudity of the above; marking the semi-magical/semi-horrific transference point--as does the film as a whole--where childhood innocence gives way to the disturbing real of adult sexuality.

Mike Gioulakis' beautiful cinematography bathes each shot in amniotic swimming pool light turquoise and early two-strip Technicolor pinks. Disasterpiece's great retro synth score pulses with amniotic analog electronic music. God it's so good. Excuse me while I have a quick rant about how much I hate Keith Emerson:

God, let there be no more orchestra scores for retro horror movies, and let first and foremost  Keith Emerson's shitty score for Suspiria follow-up Inferno stand as a warninf that busier big name musicians don't always have the same genius as more balls-to-the-wall raw players (like Goblin). Fuck Emerson, man. And fuck classically trained wankers trying to shoehorn their master's thesis into every stab of the knife. It's like if some music theorist said "hey everything's great about Halloween  except the score, why not swap it out with some grand concert piano and a busy bunch of jazzy nonsense from, say, Howard Shore?" Or Kubrick got rid of Wendy Carlos' Shining score and replaced it with some micro-managerial John Williams orchestral pomp and swirling--self-satisfied they'll be incorporated into Oscar medleys for decades to come--melodies that seem to celebrate our every emotion like we're goddamned George Washington being led by the nose through the Delaware. 

Instead of that hack mickey mouse shiite, Richard Vreeland's AKA Disasterpiece's electronic score both evokes its dream era (70s) and looks forward and into the moment to become true myth, conjuring primordial nostalgic aches for moments of dream longing-first crush-reverie so intertwined with pop culture it would be foolish to separate them from our 'actual' memories.

For me I've seen It Follows thrice already. I listen to the soundtrack nonstop while walking my Brooklyn streets, and it always seems like someone's following me; it's instant paranoia but of the delicious October kind. It's the rosy glow of nostalgia, of remembering the way safety in a group allows indulging in ominous hushed dread, campfire ghost stories, we might avoid were we alone. Thus like the dialogue of Hawks' To Have and Have Not figures in Sole Survivor, so too the esprit de corps of Hawks' The Thing plays out in It Follows. And so it is that America has finally produced a horror film it can be proud of. Amidst the myriad worthless zombie sieges, found footage asylum investigations, and torture/abduction (even Carpenter's last film fits that bill to an extent), here at last is the real deal, a thing of real beauty and urban legend potency. So a quick prayer: Mr. Mitchell, please become our new Carpenter and stay in the genre and don't go anywhere.

Lastly, forget about Ryan Murphy-crowned final girls and strident scream queens like the new Sarah Michelle Gellar, Emma Roberts. Let the lamplighter in the Detroit dark affix his beam: Maika Monroe is the Empress of October.

From top: It Follows, Halloween -- Note odd camera placement - neither in the street or on the sidewalk, the 'impossible' POV of someone standing near the curb, neither close enough to the actors that the POV becomes 'invisible' or friendly --neither hiding from a distance like other shots, nore 'with' the actors like a Hawks shot. It's the POV of eerie dissipation - as if it could cohere into a figure and rush onto the sidewalk and attack the person as they pass, but is, at the moment, disincarnate. 

See also: A Clockwork Darkness: Subjectivity, Hawks, and Halloween

24-hours of Netflix Streaming Horror--A Curated List of 16 Weird, Spooky Wonders

The all-night horror marathon --a long-standing tradition wherever Halloween traditions are solidly entombed in the crypt of cinematic history. The idea behind it is simple: the longer you stay up, the more films you watch, the deeper into late night / early morning you go, the creepier it gets as more people fall asleep and the night gradually becomes yours and yours alone and consensual reality fades and you move inside the screen, and your date follows a creepy bunny out of the theater down the sleep arson rabbit hole, no wait, that's you, a half-dreamer / half-watcher and the movie and your unconscious merge and characters in the film look right at you, talk to you, freak you out. You turn around and when you look again you just see an empty couch onscreen, and you're holding a candelabra and walking down a dark hall. And there's no one awake to hear you scream, because you put the volume down low to not wake them.

At college they had one of these festivals every year and after the first few hours they stopped taking tickets at the door and half the crowd went home, weary and irritable. By dawn it was only the hardcore, and the people working the projector. Then I'd sneak in, armed with flask and dilated pupils. There was nothing quite as satisfying as creeping across a deserted campus at the first crack of dawn, coming into the darkened theater to find THE TINGLER had just begun... If you have Netflix though, you can skip having to out your boots on to slog across campus. All you have to do is clear your que and line them up: each film is hand-selected for each particular time of evening, night and morning and afternoon, and to follow one another organically, like a good mix tape. Because if you have a sizable DVD collection as I do, then you know it can become paralyzing to choose the next film, fumbling through your bookshelves, scrolling endlessly through your instant libraries.

It's also annoying when you stumble on a cool list of weird movies online, read about one you never heard of and want to see, but can't find it. So you put it in your Netflix que and by the time it comes you forgot why you wanted to see it! Well, with this list you can forget about the options, the Acidemic Horror festival has you covered (Presuming all or any of these films are still up on streaming by the time you get this) 

And special Note: there's NO torture porn or sexual assault or slapstick, or animal abuse,  just the spine-tingling spookiness (and occasional lesbian cannibalism) that carries the tingling electric current along the soul's angsty wires. So dig, trust, and stay up so late you're up early --and with a little clean-up (exchange the empty whiskey bottles for cereal bowls) no one will be the wiser. Heh.

5:00 PM - ABSENTIA
(2010) Dir. Mike Flanagan

Start with this one, right as the sun is going down-- and don't worry about it's deceptively slow pace at first. Flanagan's film takes it's time getting started but it lures you in via the lived-in natural rapport between Katie Parker and Courtney Bell as two sisters who've moved back in together since one of whom is pregnant, and in the final stages of declaring her first husband dead (after seven long years in the titular legal limbo). The younger one (Parker), recently off drugs, is there to help with the pregnancy; she also jogs every morning and her route goes through a mysterious tunnel that recalls Billy Goats Gruff in a deceptively innocuous way.  Turns out, well, I shan't spoil it, since the terror comes from the anxiety of not knowing entirely what we're dealing with. Special highlights include Bell seeing her dead husband everywhere but being conditioned by her therapist to just ignore him (which reminded me of my past delirium tremens). I saw it alone on Saturday as it just happened to be on Showtime while I was writing the first part of this post in the other room; overhearing the great rapport between the sisters, I was soon lured me in. I was alone in the house and it was getting dark faster than I was prepared for, and the film ingeniously dug deep into my ancient fears, the way only BLAIR WITCH and Val Lewton have ever done before. And Parker is so good, warm, intelligent, and gutsy that you just might fall in love, in a sisterly way (more).

And the scary, ambiguous ending will make the next film hit even harder:

6:30 PM - HOUSE OF THE DEVIL
(2009) Dir. Ti West

Ingeniously retro and unspooling in practically in real time across one overcast grey late afternoon into the late evening, it's Ti West's best film so far, and maybe one day he'll make something as good (if he remembers the value of tick-tock momentum) and trusts his instincts. The cast is mixed but Jocelin Donahue as cash-strapped college student Samantha is beautiful, believable, and courageous in her doomed grab for a babysitting dollar, and Greta Gerwig sports some great feathered hair and a cozy college sweatshirt; their late afternoon fast food scene brought the ache of an upstate New York fall winter back to my shoulder muscles after a 20 year hiatus. I could feel myself taking a nap with Gerwig afterwards on some crappy dorm twin bed as the sun went down at five 5 PM (before getting up at 8 or so for the evening's inevitable festivities). I could feel the sense of desolation creeping up like tendrils of cold around her broke buddy Samantha. The evenings upstate are so oppressive they don't need Satan lingering in the edges to be mega ominous, and while the film's not perfect (the men are kind of anachronistically miscast--one's too quiet and wussy; the other too Williamsburg hipster snotty) but cult icons Mary Woronov and Dee Wallace smash through to make up the difference in minor roles. The perfect film to watch in the early autumn evening, still recovering from the last film's chill. By the end it's too dark to go out and you'll be too rattled to break away, so just click the Netflix right on into our next selection:

8:05 PM - BLACK SABBATH 
(1963) Dir. Mario Bava

It's the only one of Bava's films, and the only trilogy, I find truly scary - the good, shivery spine tingle kind, especially the Wurdulak segment, which taps into the way family ties can become nooses you don't notice are strangling you 'til you're too oxygen-deprived to even struggle. Strongly suspecting their father (Boris Karloff) has been turned vampire, the family are too conditioned by their rigid social structure to rebel; and the mama can't resist running out in the cold to comfort her pale dead bambino, even stabbing her husband when he tries to restrain her. Did I spoil it? No man, I didn't. PS: The American version presented here is different from the Italian most fans know by heart from the DVD, in a different order, dubbed into English, missing a lesbian undercurrent, but providing instead Karloff's real voice (not in the Italian version) and "Sdenka" (Susy Anderson) is still sexy; so is Rosie (Michèle Mercier, above), gorgeously lit as she prowls the red telephone sequence. The lighting is so gorgeous it's all in a class by itself.

9:30 PM: ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13
 (1976) Dir. John Carpenter

It's the HD version and it sure looks good. There's no supernatural element, but just seeing the cop (the brilliantly named Austin Stoker) driving alone through the deserted eerie battle zone of East L.A as the big red sun sets and Carpenter's simple, brilliant theme make it all ominous enough to qualify. Not to mention a gang member shoots a kid through the eye for asking for sprinkles during an ice cream truck hold-up. There was some real concern in the late 70s that gang violence was going to destroy America, so groove on the scariness of the film's moment and how we never hear any of the gang members say a single word. Even here, before HALLOWEEN, Carpenter knew that once a monster talks, smiles, or even laughs, it's over. The small but perfect cast includes Laurie Zimmer as the last truly Hawksian heroine, and Darwin Joston as the cigarette-strapped Hawksian outlaw Napolean Wilson; Carpenter would revisit the concept and reverse the gender/races in in GHOSTS OF MARS, which would make a great choice on this list, too, so be lookin' out for it. 

11 PM: NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD 
(1968) Dir. George Romero

Two horror films in a row starring a black man? Are we dreaming? No, just lucky--and is it a coincidence both films are classics worth endless repeat viewings? In fact, I got the whole idea for this post while spending the weekend in Harrisburg, PA (a stone's throw from where NIGHT was filmed) and turning to NIGHT via their cable's 'free on demand' channel as a last resort after everyone else was asleep, and even wrongly formatted and badly digitized, and having seen it countless times, on the big screen and in better formats, it blew my mind. From the start it's been the kind of movie that can reach a viewer right through any televisual limitation, surviving in potency even through a million second generation public domain VHS dupes. Aside from a rather wearying stretch of road with a bald uptight dad going on and on about how "the cellar is the safest place" there's nary a dull moment. Even if you just saw it for the 100th time; see it again, Karras, in here... with us.

12:30 AM: LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE 
(1973) Dir. John Hough

Dark, thick atmosphere, decadent art design; red bathed Bava-esque level of warm, dusky, painterly light; the translucently pale skin of two beautifully alive in the firelight reflection of the rose red wallpaper women; the throbbing echo-industrial drone breathing, the score like one long auditory hallucination, sexy as hell and brilliant, creepy, untamed, assertive--it's ideal for the midnight hour of any festival (see more here) when you might be getting as surly as the characters here (the leader starts bickering, belittling and bullying from the get-go).

Or if, like me, you just saw it.. go for (also in HD) and full of crabby yelling...

12: 30 AM (alternate) DAY OF THE DEAD
(1984) Dir. George Romero

1985 was a year of great zombie contention, according to a hazily remembered source, between Romero and co-NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD screenwriter John A. Russo. The result was two different zombie movies coming out at the same time, back when there were NO other zombie movies, outside of Italy, of course, certainly none that would make it a first run cineplex instead of a decaying drive-in. My punk crew and I saw both in one weekend; we loved THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, which really jibed with our then lifestyle (the whole thing with zombies going "Braaainnsss!" is from RETURN). But we found DAY a downer. Half the film is spent in irritable bickering between gonzo scientists (demanding more test subjects; trying to isolate what makes zombies tick) and a bunch of crazed military guys getting understandably tired of being bossed around by civilians. The pissy yelling and soldier Gary Howard Klar's evil snicker-giggling get annoying, but the idea of Bub (Sherman Howard) the first sympathetic zombie, being trained by one of the lead scientist (Richard Liberty) is tellingly Romero, who's always gone more for the social critique underlying the zombie menace and less the comedic self-awareness and suspense generation of most of his imitators. And perhaps the split from Russo hurts them both equally--the humor and speed could help with the social message stuff and vice versa-- the military and the scientists need each other after all. Meanwhile, a cool Jamaican chopper pilot (Terry Alexander) and and an amiable Irish drunk (Jarlath Conroy) have the right idea: set up some inflatable palm trees around a camper at the edge of the mine shaft and grow ganja. Humanity is saved.

2 AM - THE VAMPIRE LOVERS
(1970) Dir. Roy Ward Baker

Not only does it open on one of the worst matte painting castle exteriors in history, it also stands as a great British horror crossroad, straddling the decades with unrepentant 70s sapphic nudity right alongside all the typical 60s Hammer vampire Gothic trappings: florid dialogue, gorgeous Brit actresses, Peter Cushing, all that. Especially if you have a good HD TV, it's worth its precious 2 AM time slot because the colors are sublime. Once you see Peter Cushing's blazing red tunic in the post-credits dance scene, you're like DAMN. That ballroom looks 3-D, and then in comes Ingrid Pitt as Marcela Karnstein, and then two gorgeous fertile looking virgins just waiting to get knocked over like bloodless ten pins. You can float for days. And the time slot is just right for such 'ahem' moments, as guards are beginning to come down.

3:30 AM - THE AWAKENING 
(2007) Dir. Nick Murphy

So now it's late, and all that's left after VAMPIRE LOVERS is a yen to see and hear more British women--so effortlessly smart, confident, commanding (yet not bitchy), sexual (yet not slutty or self-hating) and relaxed compared with American actresses-- as they engage in candle lit supernatural hallway walking and weird noise investigating. Rebecca Hall--as a professional ghost-debunker lured to her existential Waterloo-- fits the bill. The movie around her aims in the direction of THE OTHERS, THE INNOCENTS, DEVIL'S BACKBONE, and THE WOMAN IN BLACK, and she aims for the stalwart company of Olivia Williams, Rhona Mitra, Kate Beckinsale, and Kierra Knightley. Bullseye on both counts. The setting and photography are evocative: a real old mansion of marble and crumbling plaster, greenish blue hues make it seem forever a cloudy dawn. Dominic West is suitably Rochester-esque as the superintendent. There's a kid with a distractingly awful haircut and a creepy dollhouse. You'll guess the twists a mile off, but that doesn't mean you don't like guessing. Just means you're good at it. So drink deep!

5:00 AM - PONTYPOOL (2008)

Dir. Bruce McDonald

It might not be as cold where you are as up in Pontypool, Canada (for the film's set in the dead of winter over one crazy-early morning local news radio time slot) but otherwise there's a lot of eerie meta sameness if you watch this film as the sun comes up outside: the special feeling when you and maybe none or two of your mates and only a few early risers and very very late-to-bedders are up and about in your time zone. You can at five AM spread you auric tentacles out and bask in the collapse of concrete consensual reality, which is like a whole alternate dimension, neither an asleep dream nor a conscious consensual reality. What really makes PONTYPOOL work so well in this mindset/time is the comfortable sense of being in a warm radio booth in a frozen Ontario small town in the ver early early morning --still dark out, and no one else on the street, for the most part... Disgruntled talk radio host Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) begins to think the locals are all fucking with him as the calls coming in from early risers, each new call being more and more panicked, incoherent, and violent. Mazzy is a bit of a crusty handful and his producer (Lisa Houle) shows the wear and tear of humoring such a charismatic, witty but bitter and paranoid dude on a regular basis. The unfolding morning events are so organic it all unfolds in real time for long stretches without the viewer (me at least) noticing any lapse. As the influx of news and shaky narration causes a breakdown in our perception of reality. Since we never leave the basement station, we're left to imagine most of the carnage in a kind of WAR OF THE WORLDS broadcast in reverse.

In other words, while not being specifically super-duper scary, and always kind of funny (even romantic), at other times nearing almost over the line into full-on literary pretension, there's a sense that something meta is always at stake, something that might leak out and affect even your seeing it. It's like you could call in to Mazzy's show and maybe he'd answer onscreen, and tell you to turn down your TV, and you'd both realize you'd probably fallen asleep. It's okay... it's okay... itsooo kayyyy (more)

6:30 AM - HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1959)

Dir. William Castle

William Castle prided himself on being the dime store spooky matinee knockoff Hitchcock, and his palpable love of his audience, spookiness and a good time for all help his films endure, like hazy childhood memories of parking lot haunted carnival rides --cheap and loud, but innocuous, fun, and capable of delivering the perfect aftershock of spooky-nostalgia. This his masterwork, as subtle as a skeleton on a string zooming over the heads of the popcorn tossing kiddies (a process called "Emergo" pronounced "emer-joe") and six degrees of terrific. Like NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD it has a punchy energy that endures past any amount of public domain dupe streaking. Netflix's copy is adequate (you don't really want it to look too good) and, take it from me, six in the morning is the best time to see it, ideally with a ten year-old kid who just woke up and is sitting on the floor because you've been asleep, taking up his whole couch. Dude, where are you? What happened?

Elijah Cook Jr. gets drunk and babbles the grisly exposition; Vincent Price plays deadly games with his scheming wife (Carol Ohmart); the elderly caretakers, frozen in papier mache poses of carny ride menace, roam around in the dark on wheels; pistols in little coffins are handed out as party favors; there's two severed heads, and an animated noose. (see my first ever site, Dr. Twilite's Neighborhood, which includes this as part of its 50s Canon)

 8 AM - MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE (1971)

Dir. Gordon Hessler

The Grand Guignol meta effect is pronounced here, as it was in PENNY DREADFUL after it, and MAD LOVE before it. A movie about people performing dastardly deeds onstage is bound to echo. Here the troupe is re-imagining Poe's classic story: Now the ape is the hero and Herbert Lom gets acid thrown on his face (again?) but the audience of semi-bemused royals presume it's part of the show. If the ape looks familiar, it's because it smashed bones for Kubrick in 1968, spooked Joan Crawford as TROG in 1970, and now here it is, much the worse for moths and wear but still the only sympathetic face in the film (Did England have only one gorilla suit? Was it because Hop Toad burned the other one in 1964?).

Either way, it's a great mask, and it's director Gordon Hessler's finest hour, which doesn't say a lot. Unless you like fake mutton chops, ratty period costumes, a script that's just a few dull eps of THE AVENGERS taped together (without the actual Avengers - just the bad guys and their victims) juiced up with lurid tortures, and boozy British actors pretending they remember their lines and marks. Well, the Demoiselles are stunning and dressed in dusky reds and black lace chokers which radiate lovely haunting power in this HD print (making their acid scarring all the more painful); and even at low wattage, sleepy star Jason Robards is better than most; and the period mise en scene is at least at Hammer level toasty; and the budget relatively big (were they poaching other films' sets?) and there's galore post-modern leakage, which is why it's after PONTYPOOL. And if you fall asleep, well dream your way right in.... into the cage, that is, with Erich, the gorilla!

9:30 AM - BLACK SUNDAY (1965)

Dir. Mario Bava

I could do without the schmaltzy concert piano score or the misogynist torture of the opener, but the rest is great, and it's perfect Halloween fare. Lots of long pans and dollies across acres of ancient castle griffins and Barbara Steele standing or lying with eerie alien stillness and holes in her face. Even the 'good' Steele is spooky looking, like a reverse Rondo Hatton! This was Bava's big American calling card, and it's a perfect breakfast movie once the ugly taste of Catholic metal spikes is out of your mouth. The print used here is just so so, but it might inspire you to get the Blu-ray, to better savor the tactile, brilliant cinematography and dreamy dark fairy tale poeticism.

11:00 AM -HELLRAISER  (1987)

Dir. Clive Barker

This was just an innocent list but it's become about the actresses of Great Britain, more cigarette resonant and unabashedly sexual than most American girls depicted in films. this chick Julia (Clare Higgins) has the balls to ask for a brandy from her husband when she's sick, rather than refusing one with a dainty little 'eh' of a sneeze like a Yank bird; and it's pretty great the way she plays with a sadistic smile after her first kill, traumatized but hardly succumbing to the American tendency to play the glum martyr --though even now she says she's afraid of thunder, and worthless husband Larry is like, "I'll protect you!" not realizing she's already done and seen things that would turn him ashen. To bring his brother (her lover) back from the Cenobiteverse, for example, Julia gamely lures a string of grotty 70s-looking British business men on their three martini lunch hour up to the attic, where she bashes their heads in with a hammer so her love can slowly absorb their blood and put some meat on his bones, as it were. Her stepdaughter meanwhile (Ashley Laurence) is getting wise, and endangered by angler fish-esque demons and shit. She's cool too but with her beyond-morality pursuit of pleasure, unapologetic wit and intelligence, and her mature handling her body, Julia's exhibit A in what's lacking in so many similar American ladies, who tend to be youth-worshipping baby doll types until it's too late to dodge the Baby Jane mirror headlights (click this searing yet lovingly indulgent list that tracks them from Lolita to cougar). Think Julia gives a fuck her man's got no lips or skin? She'll shag him anyway just as he wouldn't care if she was in the thick of her period. Fookin' A. Oh yeah, the Cenobites themselves: not my bag, but I respect the analogy towards the masochism of the horror marathon viewer! If you've seen it lately, HELLRAISER 2 is pretty good too, even #3 is watchable, but it's a steep slope, human!

12:30 PM: LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM (1985)

Dir. Ken Russell

Keep the British lady thing going with this gem from Ken Russell, the colors on the Netflix are gorgeous. Amanda Donohoe is a tour de force, never camping or vamping but nailing, in every possible permutation that verb can be permuted, the most intoxicating upper crust broad since Stanwyck as the Lady Eve. Her snake goddess is what Auntie Mame always aspired to be but could never shake her ostentatious Americana baggahge. Familiar Scottish face Peter Capaldi is a summering archeologist who unearths a dragon skull; Hugh Grant, in his film debut, is great as the local lord-inherit who inherits too the burden of a giant white worm; the two local blonde sisters at the inn (Catherine Oxenberg and Sammi Davis) are fetching, smart, and crafty; and even the hallucination scene has a disturbing potency-- "she had a bad trip" -- notes Grant, after one of the sisters accidentally touches some of hallucinatory snake venom. No one ever says no to a drink anywhere in the film, thank god. Between this and his Chopin opposite Judy Davis in IMPROMPTU, Grant was melting hearts like only Cary Grant used to before him. There's also the hottest older woman-on-paralyzed younger boy seduction in film since Creedence Leonore Gielgud's in TROLL 2. So forgive the occasional silliness, such as the absurd fangs and charmed dancing of Paul Brooke, be charmed yourself.

2 PM - INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS

(1977) Dir. Phillip Kaufman

Let's face it, you're never going to make it this far in this bizarro festival -- the 'you' who began doesn't even exist anymore. A slough of cells, a weariness, probably passing out, falling asleep, and when you wake up, the you back in the cool raro moments at the crack of dawn with HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL are long gone. It's cool. I get it. Move on if you must, but make sure it's still you and there's not a shell of a being that was once or will be you under your pool table or cooling in your sauna, or in your garden, or in the crawlspace, or under your bed. And then put this on the 'stream and join the flow of ditrates and bata. And then read Poe's William Wilson. And weep...

And let's just say the HD print on Netflix looks damned good, which is important as Michael Chapman's photography is of that great 70s urban texture dilapidated period (he also did TAXI DRIVER), filled with great moments of alienation. San Francisco makes an ideal crucible for the dehumanization of 20th century society, the urban disconnect from your closest neighbors, and the cast includes: Leonard Nimoy as a pop psychologist; Brooke Adams and Donald Sutherland as health inspectors on the run; Jeff Goldblum and a pre-ALIENS / post-BIRDS Veronica Cartwright as their mud bath-slangin' friends; and even Kevin McCarthy and Robert Duvall in moments of cameo stunt casting. See it with someone you love and then wonder...

4:00 PM - YOU'RE NEXT (2013)

Dir. Adam Wingard

Let's end on a cheerful, non-supernatural note... Scrappy Sharni Vinson is a great final-ish girl, full of wily Australian gumption in this tale of a besieged family reunion in the woods; it works because it recalls not just classics of the 70s and 80s, but classics of the 30s, i.e. the old dark house full of secret panels, greedy relatives gathered for the will, lightning storms, scary masks, strong female leads, no one who they seem, ironic karma, sudden twisting violence, moody Carpenter-esque synth soundtrack, and a refreshing lack of any moral compass. (MORE)

If you've recently seen any of the above, do substitute GRABBERS, BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, SCREAM, SCREAM 2, BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, RE-ANIMATOR, JOHN DIES AT THE END, EVIL DEAD 2 (though it's got some slapstick, fair warning) and/or CABIN IN THE WOODS, CANDYMAN, or WITCHING AND BITCHING, or see them all later. And for God's sake, stay alert, lock your doors, keep watching the knobs and clutching the butcher knife or fire poker, and turn on a white noise machine or Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast to block the spooky noises of trees against the window, because they're not trees....