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Adam and his wife Margo are throwing a housewarming party with the guests principally Adam’s co-workers and employers. However, one couple, Tom and Sasha, professing to be neighbors has crashed the party and linger well after the other guests have departed. As the two couples, with drinks and drugs, get to know each other Tom and Sasha’s presence inflames lingers issues for Adam and Margo. It becomes clear that Tom and Sasha are not what they claimed and are manipulating the rising tension for some hidden agenda.

Who Invited Them? falls into the genre of horror that is suspense/thriller without any supernatural elements. Suspense/thriller is very script and character dependent and without relatable characters behaving in understandable ways it very easy loses its suspension of disbelief. This movie doesn’t completely fall apart but neither did it fully engage me, and I was always at a bit of distance from the Adam and Margo never really invested in their relationship. Still, I was curious enough to keep watching and see how the entire plot unfolded and what coming reveal might twist the script into a new direction.

Sadly, the reveal when it was presented turned out to be precisely what I had suspected with Tom and Sash’s goal proved to be underwhelming. Perhaps more damaging to the film overall success as a story is that in the final resolution Adam and Margo turned out to be far too passive as characters with happenstance and chance playing far too great in the movie’s climax. Still at a scant 80 minutes Who Invited Them? plays quickly and for some it is a thrilling psychological horror, just not for me.

Who Invited Them? is streaming on Shudder.

Neon Pictures

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Enys Men (Pronounced In-es Main) is a 2022 cornish Folk horror set on the windswept desolate island of Enys Men. Set in 1973 the film follows an unnamed naturalist as she repetitiously records the ground temperature and her observations of seven flowers growing on the island while fascinated by a tall, weathered stone figure looking out over the sea and with lichen growing upon it. Amid the repetitive actions of the naturalist the film often intersplices unsettling sequences and imagery. The film’s narrative is nearly non-existent, doing away with such traditional conventions such as character arcs or any sort of act structure, relying upon imagery to convey emotional meaning.

Enys Men is more akin to poetry than narrative film and its sedate pacing will task many viewers. The film is reminiscent of the works of David Lynch but not as lyrical nor as impactful. I think that there is a quite small audience for Enys Men and sadly I cannot be counted among them. It lacks both the weird factor of something like Mulholland Drive and a stronger narrative nature of hold on it, leaving it, like its unnamed naturalist, trapped between worlds.

Paramount PIctures

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Released in 1933, 90 years ago, Murders in the Zoo is playing as part of the Criterion Channel’s ‘Pre-Code Horror’ selections. While some of the scenes, particularly one at the front are gruesome and would have been stripped once the production began serious enforcement this film is less transgressive than many pre-code classics.

Eric Gorman (Lionel Atwill) is big game hunter, millionaire, and philanthropist with an inflated ego is and murderously jealous of any man showing attraction to his wife Evelyn (Kathleen Burke.) Gorman murders his victim by staging animal attacks and accidents.

With a running time of just 62 minutes this movie is clearly a traditional B feature. Atwill has appeared in several early horror films and as a ‘second banana’ performed quite well, however hampered with a lackluster script and second-rate dialog he proved inadequate as a lead to carry this movie.

Murders in the Zoo has none of the sacrilegious flair of Paramount’s better known pre-code horror The Island of Lost Souls and wastes far too much time with a bumbling secondary character meant for comic relief. A few scenes are effective and unnerving, particularly Gorman dispatching a rival in the jungle on a hunt, but over all this movie is dull, plodding, and scarcely worth anyone’s time or attention. Viewers concerned with animal welfare and cruelty are advised to skip this feature as in the climax of the story big cats are forces to attack each other and no production justifies such cruelty.

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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.