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I am going to try to alternate these Spooky Season posts between films and television I have watched before and ones I have not, Sleepy Hollow I watched in the theater during its original run.

Loosely based on the classic American short story Sleepy Hollow re-united Director Tim Burton with his favorite actor Johnny Depp for a unique take on the tale of Ichabod Crane and his encounter with the headless horseman terrorizing an isolated community.

Paramount Pictures

In this adaptation Crane (Depp) is a police constable from New York City, despised and distrusted for his belief in scientific analysis and rationality, now dispatched to the community of Sleep Hollow where gruesome decapitations have struck fear into the farming community. Upon arrival the town’s leading men advise that the murders are the work of a vengeful spirit, the headless horseman taking his revenge on the locals. Crane, a man of reason rejects their superstitious folktales assuring the men that the murderer is a man of flesh and blood. What Crane encounters in Sleepy Hollow upends his world view about reason, science, the supernatural and himself.

While the story is officially set in upstate New York in the last years of the 18th century there is no doubt that thematically and artistically the production is thoroughly English with stylistic flairs that call to mind the heyday of Hammer Horror. The cast, with few exceptions, is deeply English from Hammer veteran Christopher Lee is what is little more than a cameo to genre favorites such as Michael Gambon, known to younger audiences as Dumbledore (2) from Harry Potter and Ian McDiarmid, (Palpatine from the Star Wars franchise).

The film is photographed with desaturated color save for the blood which is rendered in brilliant crimson. The production design reflects Burton’s quirky with more than one moment evoking the ‘Large Marge’ jump scare from Burton’s first feature, Peewee’s Big Adventure.

Sleepy Hollow is not a film that will deeply scare you, leaning closer to adventure than true horror but the copious blood spurts and on-screen decapitations will test some audiences. I thoroughly enjoyed this film on its initial release and continue to enjoy it on home video.

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Robert Eggers’ first feature film and the production that introduced the world to the talents of Anya Taylor-Joy The Witch: A New England Folktale is my kind of horror movie.

The Witch centers on a 16th century family that had crossed the Atlantic Ocean with a colony

A24 Studios

only to find themselves exiled from the plantation for their overly strict interpretation of scripture. On their isolated farm on the edge of a vast and wile forest the family is tormented by the ‘witch of the wood,’ going mad and turning upon each other.

The film is a slow-burn eschewing bloody gore and jump scares for methodical grinding tension and paranoia. Everything that occurs in the story feels ‘off’ and even simple hares imbue scenes with dread and foreboding. The Witch is not for everyone, in addition to a measured pace without explicit violence every ten minutes the dialog presented is authentic 16th century English, comprehensible to modern audiences but requiring a greater focus and attention.

The film’s dedication to period production design helps craft a nearly perfect illusion that the audience is witnessing events from the 16th century. Cinematographer Jarin Blaschke’s excellent use of only period light sources, lanterns and candles, also adds greatly to not only the realism of the setting but the mood of building fear with so little of the frame fully visible. The music score by composer Mark Korven utilizes choirs and ascending scales that is discordant and continually building with clear resolution perfectly mirror the pace of the story.

The cast is uniformly great, along with Anya Taylor-Joy in the lead as teenager Thomasin, the film has Ralph Ineson as the father William, prideful and stubborn in his faith, Kate Dickie as the mother who loses all grip on reality as her family disintegrates, along with a collection talented young actor portraying the younger children.

The Witch played October 4th as part of AMC’s Thrills and Chills from A24. The rest of the month includes on 11th Ty West’s X, on the 18th Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin and concluding on the 25th with Ari Aster’s modern folk horror Midsommar.

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I decided to kick off Spooky Season 2023 with a bit of classic horror that I had not seen from the pre-code era, 1932’s Thirteen Women.

Warner Brothers Studios

In what could be considered a proto-slasher Thirteen Women, adapted from a novel of the same name by Tiffany Thayer, is the story of a collection of old-school mates, each of whom has gotten a foreboding lettering advising that their personal horoscopes predict doom and death for each of them. The predictions come to pass with terrifying accuracy including the suicide of the mystic casting the horoscopes. The film doesn’t dwell long on the mystery of the person behind these forecasts but does, in fashion of slashers to come, hold back the person’s motivations until the film’s final scenes.

At just over an hour long the movie is really too short for the subject. Not all thirteen women are represented on the screen, and often the manipulations that bring each prediction into reality is presented too quickly and glibly for any real suspense or impact.

That said this movie has a number of rather surprising and well-executed sequences for 1932, including a stunt sequence where our heroic detective must climb from one car to a driverless and out of control limousine.

The cast includes Myrna Loy before her fame in the Thin Man series of mystery movies, as the villainous Ursula Georgi. In this period of her career Myrna Loy often played ‘exotic’, that is to say non-white, characters that were evil and manipulative while performing in the ghastly practice of ‘yellow face.’ While the film both in the employment of ‘yellow face’ and presenting Asian characters inscrutable traffics in the accepted racism of its time it also presents an argument against that racism detailing in part the harm it creates.

Far too short for it material and marred by casual racism Thirteen Women is not without merit and the film’s final 25 minutes or so were thoroughly compelling. This is perhaps something that could be remade into a project of real interest.

Thirteen Women is currently streaming on Criterion Channel as part of their ‘Pre-Code Horror’ series.

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I first watched Day of the Dead, the conclusion to George A Romero’s ‘Dead’ trilogy, in a fun and

Laurel Entertainment

hopeful mood. At the time I worked at the US Glasshouse theater in the Sport Arena area of San Diego and my friend Brad, who was the assistant manager there, had just finished assembling the print on the platter for the project. So, late at night, after everyone else had left, we ran the print and watched it just the pair of us Zombie fans.

We were disappointed.

Now, nearly 40 years later, I have watched the movie again this time as part of the 6-film marathon hosted by Film Geeks SD.

It is still disappointing.

The Night of the Living Dead introduced the zombie plague where the recently deceased are animated and then attack and eat the living. A small, contained film it boasted a diverse set of characters trapped in microcosm of American society fighting, and failing, to save their lives.

Dawn of the Dead, produced a decade later, presented a world in the process of being overrun by the living dead with society collapsing into anarchy. The central characters, with sharply drawn natures, flee their responsibilities for a life of isolated decadence with a shopping mall. This film is a satire on consumerism, holding a mirror to humanity’s obsession with possessions even after death.

After a pair of sharp, interesting film populated with interesting characters I had high hopes for Day of the Dead, but Romero’s script presents none of the flourish or insight this time around that he had displayed in the previous two movies.

The movie follows a set of characters in a hastily assembled research facility that is tasked with understanding and defeating the zombie outbreak. The world has been overrun and for months these survivors have been unable to contact anyone on the radio as their number dwindle. Tensions run high between scientists tasked with the research, the army troops assigned to the facility, and the civilian support staff as the hopelessness of their condition becomes more and more evident.

That is an excellent premise. It is a crime that Romero’s populated it with flat, stereotypical cardboard cutouts instead of characters. Each division of characters, scientist, military men, and civilian are presented exactly the same way, without any meaningful differences. Heroic characters are presented not only as heroic but as correct and moral. Villainous characters, which include all the military men save for one romantic interest, are presented as crude, cruel, and bigoted.

The cast, struggling with the flawed screenplay, is fairly forgettable, except for two, Sherman Howard as the zombie ‘Bub’ and Richard Liberty as the chief scientist Dr. Logan. Howard performs excellent mime-work, giving ‘Bub’ a depth that is lacking from most of the human character while Liberty is mischievous in his choices as an actor imbuing Logan with a life that stands out in sharp relief to all the other performances.

This pair of actors however is not enough to salvage the film which wanders zombie-like from cliche to cliche with Romero cribbing from himself like so many low budget zombie movies did in the wake of Dawn of the Dead.

Now, I was prepared to suspend my disbelief that the dead could reanimate as it is central to the story’s conceit. That said I simply cannot accept as any form of reality that the base is constructed in the vast stone caverns beneath South Florida.

Between the absurdity of its setting, the flatness of the characters, and the lack of any coherent theme Day of the Dead is a movie that I shan’t watch again for another 40 years.

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A quick note to recognize and celebrate that the WGA and AMPTP have reached an agreement and the strike is coming to an end.

This year Film Geeks San Diego threw a Secret Morgue themed around Zombies. That means six films the titles unreleased to the festival attendees, with snack, lunch, and a dinner provided. Starting at 9:00am at the Comic-Con Museum in San Diego’s Balboa Park and going until nearly midnight. As with the other Secret Morgues I have attended this was a blast.

I arrived early enough to score a parking spot right in front of the venue which made it easy for me at breaks to head out and grab a cold soda from the cooler I had stashed in my Kia Soul. Sadly, a friend I hadn’t seen in years came down sick and wasn’t able to attend as planned but I was more social than usual and managed a few conversations.

And I should note that my predictions for the schedule turned out to be utterly wrong.

The First was The Zombies of Mora Tau. Produced in 1957, a dozen years before George A Romero reinvented the entire zombie genre with Night of the Living Dead, Mora Tau centers on a group of treasure hunters intent on recovering lost, cursed, diamonds from the bottom of a bay. The diamonds however are guarded by the zombies of the men who stole them, enactors of the curse. Neither Voodoo nor Romero styled zombies, the living dead her are closer akin to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, though vastly less intelligent. Hardly a great film it was still a fun one.

The Second movie was Pontypool from 2008. Set in a radio station experiencing Canada’s harsh winter, this film follows the experiences of a tiny news crew as they attempt to make sense of the reports filtering in and the eventual threat that invades their AM Radio station. Inventive, character driven, and well-designed this film shows a lot can be done with very little.

Next up was Deadstream, released in 2022. This movie I had heard about but actually avoided because it was of a style I find usually distasteful, the ‘found footage’ made so popular by The Blair Witch Project, a movie that earned praise all out of measure with its quality. Deadstream that takes as its central conceit that we are watching a liver stream of a YouTube-like influencer attempting to reclaim his followers after a social media disaster, was fun, funny, and at time surprisingly horrific.

The next pair of movies were ones I had seen before. The Return of the Living Dead (1985) a black comedy written and directed from the screenwriter of Alien, and truly one of my favorite zombie films, and Day of the Dead the disappointing conclusion to Romero’s original trilogy, filled with one-note, cardboard characters and most fantastic element ever seen in a zombie movie, vast subterrain caverns in South Florida.

We concluded the evening with a Mexican animated movie El Santos vs La Tetona Mendez. Over-the-top with far more crude humor than suits my sensibilities it was not without it comic moments but far from the sort of film I would seek out and watch more than once.

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Exorcist 3: Believer yet another film in a franchise that should have never existed, is about to hit the screens and it had me thinking on why only the first film has any quality for me.

The Exorcist, novel and screenplay, was written by William Peter Blatty, until that book best known as a comedic writer in Hollywood. While hitting trouble spiritual waters Blatty, a Catholic, write The Exorcist in part exploring his own faith and what it meant to him. Neither Blatty nor direct Friedken consider the film a horror movie even though it was marketed and widely seen as part of that long genre. It does not follow the usual cause and effect trajectory of a horror movie. Father Merrin’s archeological dig in Iraq does not release the demon from its containment, nor does Regan’s playing with a Ouija board cause her possession. In fact, the friendship between Friedkin and Blatty was severely damaged by Friedkin removing from the theatrical cut a scene Blatty considered absolutely essential to the theme and understanding of the story. It was later restored in the edition titled ‘the version you’ve never seen’ and it is the scene where karris questions why? Why this girl and Merrin provides the answer so that by the possession we will view humanity as mere animal, disgusting and unworthy of God’s love. The entire story rests on questions of doubt about God and his eternal love.

Now I am not, despite what the Monkeys might sing, a believer. That said Blatty was, and it is crucial to his novel and screenplay. At the very least within the setting of The Exorcist Catholicism is real and is an accurate depiction of the universe and its spiritual nature. Regan’s possession only makes sense in the context of a monotheistic god of love and a struggle for the souls of humanity.

Exorcist II: The Heretic jettisoned Blatty’s examination of faith for a typical horror plot of the 1970s where there is no mention of god or the tenets of Christianity replacing them with the sudden appearance of ‘superior’ humans with the psychic ability to heal others and the possession of the first film is retconned into a bid by demons to stop the evolution. The resulting movie is an incomprehensible miss-mash of pop psychology and ESP devoid of faith.

Exorcist III written and directed by Blatty, ignores the second film and attempts to get back to matters of faith, but intervening apparently blunted Blatty’s questions and the script and film lack essential core theme and sincerity of the groundbreaking first film.

After another lengthy break the studio returned to the franchise commissioning a film by noted writer and direct Paul Schrader, but when the final product dissatisfied the studio bosses, and the entire project was reshot by Renny Harlan as a more action/horror film. Eventually both movies were released as Exorcist: The Beginning and Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist. Despite framing the story around Father Merrin and his crisis of faith following World War II neither movie found the heart of the original and neither found success with audiences.

Following another fallow period, the studio tried again this time with a sequel television series and now have once again returned to the big screen with yet another sequel. I have littler faith that the newest film will seriously examine faith from an honest Christian or Catholic perspective. I suspect such an approach would simply be too frightening too skittish about offending some element of the audience. As such we will be treated to another movie built around set pieces, extreme visual effects, and utterly devoid of meaning.

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Local cinephile organization Film Geeks SD is hosting this Saturday September 23 the annual Secret Morgue a six-movie marathon. The titles of the films are secret with only the theme acknowledged. Previous marathons have had the themes of SF/Aliens, Witches, Animal Attacks, and 70s/80s horror. This year’s theme is zombies and that covers a lot of ground. Each year I have attended I have enjoyed, and I expect 2023 to be no different.

I am going to take some guesses as to which movie might screen. While I know some of the organizers, they have not nor would they ever give me any hints to the titles, so these are all just guesses of varying quality.

Night of the Living Dead: There are two reason I think this is a likely contender. First, it is the ur-text for modern zombie movies. Before Night zombie movies were Caribbean mystical zombies and afterwards that variety became to exception rather than the rule. the second reason is that the movie is in the public domain and therefore there are no rights holders with their palms out demanding cash for a public screening.

 City of the Living Dead I suspect at least one Italian zombie flick is going to make an appearance and it’s either this one or Zombie. I’ll put my money on the lesser-known film with the Lovecraft references.

One Cut of the Dead: A more recent film that has garnered praise within the horror community but not widely known outside of that social structure.

Sugar Hill A 70s blaxploitation zombie movie will be almost irresistible to the people of Film Geeks SD. It also has the charm of being a post-Night zombie movie that didn’t just crib from Romero’s cult classic.

The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue An English/Spanish co-production from the 70s, it clearly has inspiration from Romero’s Night but was produced before the zombie apocalypse became a cultural touchstone.

White Zombie A pre-code Bela Lugosi movie about classic Voodoo zombies, enslavement, and sexual perversion that also is in the public domain.  It is the original Zombie movie and for that fact alone I think there is a strong chance that it screens in the marathon.

I shall report from the Morgue and let all of you know how terrible my guesses turned out to be.

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A Haunting in Venice is star and director Kenneth Branagh 3rd outing as Agatha Christie’s detective Hercule Poirot. Adapted from Christie’s novel Hallowe’en Party Branagh and

20th Film Studios

screenwriter Michael Green fully commit to the aesthetics of a ghost story for this interpretation with a raging storm outside, which also conveniently removes the authorities from investigating the crimes, an ancient house with countless dark and dreadful chambers, and a tragic history full of the unexpressed anger expected from ghostly vengeance. That said this is a Hercule Poirot mystery and it is no spoiler to reveal that nothing supernatural is at hand and only the living can speak for the dead.

The story opens with Poirot retired in Venice with a dour bodyguard to chase away anyone attempting to engaged Poirot’s services when an American mystery author, an old acquaintance of the detective’s, Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) lures him out of his seclusion. Ariadne house found a medium Mrs. Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh) whom Ariadne cannot prove as a fraud. She needs Poirot to either reveal the tricky or confirm the fantastic nature of the woman’s metaphysical talents. Mrs. Reynold is scheduled to perform a seance at a reputedly cursed and haunted home. Once there the cast of diverse and suspicious characters is revealed and Poirot, despite his intention to retire is drawn inexorably into a murderous mystery.

 A Haunting in Venice is a terribly lovely film with pitch perfect cinematography by Hans Zambarloukos and a unique musical score by Icelandic composer Hildur Gudnadottir. Branagh is exception at crafting sequences that hold the fear and suspense suspended in the air like a fog slowly drifting to the ground. It would be quite something to see him tackle a proper ghost/horror film and not one merely reproducing the style of one.

The cast is uniformly talented, and it is so very nice to see Michelle Yeoh cast in a part that is in no way a typical ‘Michelle Yeoh’ role with even her ethnicity unrelated to the role.

The mystery unfolds in a manner expected of a Christie plot. That is to say that there are elements and backstory details not presented to the audience before the third act’s required detective’s exposition but as this is to be expected from Christie it should not be held against the film.

A Haunting in Venice is currently playing in theaters nationwide.

Warner Brothers Studio

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Four years following the harrowing events of The Exorcist Regan McNeil (Linda Blair) is a 16-year-old girl studying at an arts and performance school in New York City and apparently still unable to recall her possession and exorcism.

The Catholic Church dispatches Father Lamont (Richard Burton) to investigate the death of Father Merrin (Max Von Sydow) during Regan’s exorcism. Lamont, himself a survivor of a botched exorcism, inserts himself into Regan psychiatric treatment by Dr. Tuskin (Louise Fletcher) discovering through hypnosis and a psychic link with Regan that Merrin did not die of his well-displayed heart condition but rather from the demon psychically manipulating Merrin’s heart. Lamont pushes forward his investigation to discover why Regan was targeted for possession and to validate Father Merrin’s heretical theories about humanity.

Oh god, this movie is bad.

First off as a sequel it makes no sense. The Church is concerned about Merrin and what happened to him, as though an elderly man with a heart condition having a heart attack and dying is at all more peculiar than a healthy young priest defenestrated to his death. However as far as this movie is concerned Father Karris never existed. The movie always undercuts one of the main mysteries of The Exorcist, why her? Why Regan McNeil? In the longer released version Merrin speculates, correctly, that it is to make us feel that we are animals, unworthy of God’s love. When that scene was cut from the film it damaged to friendship between the writer Blatty and the director Fried kin because Blatty believed it to be so critical to understanding the meaning of what he had created.

This ties to the second reason this movie doesn’t work; it simply isn’t Catholic enough.

Now I am a non-believer. I do not believe in any gods or goddesses. The universe is ruled by physical laws and when we die, we end. That said, if you are crafting a work that hinges on religious theology then you need to stay true to that theology as it is the reality of that world. Blatty was a Catholic and wrote the novel and screenplay for The Exorcist exploring his deeply held faith and what evil means in the world he viewed as fallen. Part of the reason The Exorcist is so compelling and is because it comes from a sincere belief in its truth. Exorcist II: The Heretic abandons all that for uber-psychics with special mental healing powers and their destiny to unify humanity into one grand loving mind. That is pretty damned far from any Christian theology.

Aside from the lackluster script the movie is further damaged by some of the most blank, lifeless line readings I have ever seen on the screen. It is as if director Boorman, in an attempt to live up to his surname, instructed everyone to play their parts in a bad imitation of Star Trek’s Vulcan race. This movie has some real acting talent in it, Max Von Sydow, Richard Burton, Louise Fletcher, and James Earl Jones, but there is not one scene of genuine emotion in the entire movie.

The film’s score by the great Ennio Morricone is discordant to the point of distracting and quite possibly the worst score that man has ever composed.

Exorcist II‘s art direction is equally damaging to any suspension of willing disbelief. The sets look like sets, with studio lighting and backdrops only marginally better than what had been achieved on television a decade earlier.

The Exorcist is a film I revisit often, Exorcist II: The Heretic I last watched 40 years ago and revisiting it was a mistake.

Exorcist II” The Heretic is currently streaming on Max.