Halloween 2021: October 30th

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)

To people of a certain age, Alvin Schwartz' “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” books are notorious. Not necessarily because the stories contained within, all of which were variations on well-known urban legends and folk stories, were especially intense. Instead, it was Stephen Gammell's absolutely nightmarish illustrations that made those books so disturbing. Gammell's artwork was actually too freaky for me as a kid and I didn't grow to appreciate it until I was an adult. (And that artwork is so iconic that, when later editions of the books replaced his drawings with tamer images, people protested.)  Making a film out of material as thin as this – most of the stories are only a page or two long – but one was announced anyway in 2013. I was skeptical but, once Guillermo del Toro and André Øvredal signed onto the project, I knew it was in good hands.

Øvredal and del Toro forego making an anthology film out of “Scary Stories.” Instead, they weave the tales into a single narrative. The time is 1968 and the place is Mill Valley, Pennsylvania. The town has the legend of Sarah Bellows, a local witch who supposedly told scary stories in exchange for the lives of children. On Halloween night, four friends – Stella, Chuck, Augie, and Tommy – enter the Bellows mansion. Stella uncovers Bellows' book and notices that the stories inside write themselves. Her friends are soon being caught up in the tales contained in Bellows' book. The young heroes must attempt to unravel this mystery before some of Bellows' stories come to claim them.

The folk tales Schwartz collected were too short to build anthology segments around but they're just long enough to become memorable set pieces. The film makes the most out of each of these horrific episodes, fusing strong filmmaking with terrifying creature effects. “The Big Toe” successfully builds suspense, as that ghastly corpse comes after a hiding Augie. The limits of the PG-13 rating are pushed when Harold the scarecrow impales his victim with a pitchfork, straw growing from his wounds and mouth. This is far from the only example of intense body horror in the film. The Jangly Man is a contorting and disassembling corpse that is made from less CGI than you'd think. That scene goes for full bore thrills but “Scary Stories'” scariest story is more subtle. It involves Chuck fleeing through a nightmarish red room while the silent, grinning Pale Woman pursues him from every angle. Gammell's horrifying art is faithfully recreated, which makes these some of the freakiest cinematic monsters that have appeared in recent memory. The make-up is so good that, when the movie relies more on CGI, as it does in the “Red Spot” sequence, it's not as effective. 

The other reason why these moments are so effective is because “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” takes the time to get you invested in each kid. The fears of each child are built into their “stories.” Tommy is fleeing the Draft, following his brother returning home in a body bag. So his story involves a dismembered corpse. Stella is afraid of being abandoned, because her mom left her dad, which is why her story is based in isolation. Even the asshole bullies long-standing distrust of Harold is established before the scarecrow comes to life. It's clever writing that's supported by a really strong cast. Zoe Colleti as Stella is absolutely charming, while Austin Zajur and Gabriel Rush are way funnier as Chcuk and Augie than they needed to be. These kids are all heroes you can root for, smart and resourceful but thoroughly vulnerable. 

By setting the film in a specific point in American history, “Scary Stories” is surprisingly insightful too. The film takes place before the embattled election between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, with the threat of the Vietnam War raging in the background. It's a time of racial persecution, as Latino Tommy faces all degrees of casual racism. Bully authority figures, whether they be jock douchbags or asshole cops, go unchallenged. Misfits are ostracized and persecuted. We discover that Sarah Bellows' story is one entwined in racism – her family's Haitian maid was blamed for teaching the girl witchcraft – and the greed of the rich seeking to protect their own power. Considering 2019 had more in common with 1968 than most would care to admit, “Scary Stories” ends up saying some things about the present as much as it does the past.

By the way, the movie looks and sounds gorgeous too. The greenish-black nights are lovely. All the spooky sets are fittingly cobweb strewn. The Halloween sequences are aglow with autumnal warmth. Marc Beltrami and Anna Drubich's score includes some subtle melodies among the typical screeching strings. I fully expect “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” to become a cult fave, especially as the kids watching this one start to grow up. (Though I hope really young kids aren't watching, since the content here is closer to “IT” than “Goosebumps.”)  The film ends by setting up further adventures, which I personally wouldn't have done, but it sounds like “More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” is getting made anyway, so it's all good. [8/10]

The Child (1977)

The common prevailing theory is that physical media for movies and television is dying a slow and drawn-out death. And it certainly seems like a majority of people are in love with a plethora of streaming services. Yet, in other ways, boutique DVD labels are flourishing, especially in the sphere of cult/horror titles. In particular, companies like Vinegar Syndrome, Severin, and Arrow almost specialize in digging up obscure titles, polishing them up, and re-presenting them to an appreciative new audience. This seems to be the goal behind Arrow's continuing American Horror Project series. That's how 1977's “The Child” went from a movie I had barely heard of to a new cult favorite everyone can't stop talking about.

Alicianne has been hired as a nanny for the Nordon family, out in the Californian countryside. Her car breaks down outside the home of Mrs. Whitfield, an eccentric old woman who warns her that pets have been disappearing in the woods. When Alicianne arrives at the Nordon home, she meets her ward: Rosalie, a very strong-willed little girl. The longer Alicianne stays at the Nordon home, the more strange things she's notices about Rosalie. How the little girl disappears for long stretches at night. How she seems to spend a lot of time in the local cemetery. And how the people who displeases Rosalie tend to end up dead.

From the opening minutes of “The Child,” it's apparent that this movie doesn't quite take place in the same world you and I inhabit. Yes, this is another one of those horror movies I've been watching a lot of this season, that have a very off-beat energy to them. Every time the characters speak, their words are stilted. The dialogue has an unsteady cadence to it. Characters cracks joke around the dinner table about people poisoning themselves with flowers. I think all the dialogue might've been dubbed, as the voices frequently do not match the faces. The acting is pretty stiff, adding to the unearthly vibes of everything. The movie is supposedly set in the thirties, though I don't see any specific evidence of this. As weird as the whole movie is, none of this is played for humor. “The Child” just seems genuinely strange, in a way that's hard to describe.

The main reason I felt the need to check “The Child” out is because one review described the movie as having incredible atmosphere. This is certainly true. There are numerous scenes set in spooky graveyards, with huge billowing clouds of fog behind the characters. An especially notable scene has Alicianne dancing with a scarecrow, that she has mistaken for Rosaline's older brother. The specific reason I'm watching this movie on October 30th is because a long scene in the middle happens to be set on Halloween. During this sequence, Alicianne is stalked through the darkened Nordon house by a Jack O' Lantern. It's a pretty great moment, making great use of the flickering light inside the pumpkin, making the carved face look especially ominous. Definitely among the creepier Halloween set scenes I've seen, that don't feature Michael Myers.

“The Child” might sound like a kid-friendly horror movie. For its first half, the spookiness here is definitely more ambiance driven than anything else. That's before the movie reveals its surprisingly gory streak. An old lady is yanked under her basement stairs by an unseen assailant, before we see she's had half her face ripped off. Rosaline's teddy bear appears to be weeping blood, before we see that one of her victim's is dripping the red stuff on it from his now empty eye sockets. In its last act, “The Child” becomes a full-blown zombie movie. Alicianne and Rosalie's brother wall themselves up in a shed, as white-headed ghouls try to break in. This is actually kind of a disappointing ending, as “The Child” was creepier and more interesting when it kept its threats off-screen. Yet the amount of head-splitting and hand-chopping the movie sneaks in during this climax is unexpected. 

The more I think about it, I'm not sure I actually had heard of “The Child” before recently. I might have been confusing it with “The Children” or “Beware! Children at Play!” Either way, I am glad I gave this one a shot. The filmmaking on display is pretty rough at times, with more than a few shaky pans or zooms. Even on the cleaned-up, Arrow release, the film is pretty dark and grainy at times. The final third gets a bit repetitive, once this fully transforms into a zombie flick. Yet “The Child” still has a weird power to it. This is one of those cult oddities that feels like a transmission from another world sometimes. It was director Robert Voskanian's sole credit, which does little to dissuade the notion that pure weirdos made this. If you can get on its off-beat wavelength, you'll probably enjoy “The Child” too. [7/10]

The Midnight Hour (1985)

One of the few upsides of having a steel-trap memory and spending entirely too much of your adult life thinking about movies is that you rarely forget a title. Sometimes I mix up names and faces but I almost never forget a title once I hear it. In the early days of my horror fandom, I can recall people mentioning some flick called “The Midnight Hour.” Apparently, it was made-for-TV and starred a young LeVarr Burton. It's not a movie critics had much to say about but, to kids who were young enough to catch it on TV in 1985, it's well regarded. Since I'm reviewing Halloween-set movies tonight, this seemed like the right time to judge “The Midnight Hour” for myself. 

Our setting is a spooky New England town called Pitchford Cove. Like every spooky New England town in a movie like this, Pitchford Cove has a curse on it. Two hundred years ago, witch Lucinda Cavender was hanged but not before promising to return some day, with the forces of Hell behind her. Nerdy teen Phil knows all this and tells his friends – jock Mitch, blondie Mary, token black guy Vinnie and Melissa, Lucinda's modern descendent – all about it too. They still think it's a good idea to break into the town museum and steal artifacts from Cavender's trial. After Melissa reads a spell from Cavender's scroll, it unleashes a legion of monsters on the town. The vampires and ghouls converge at a Halloween party in town. Phil and Sandy, the ghost of a 1950s cheerleader, have to stop the madness before Pitchford Cove is consumed by it.

For a TV movie from 1985, “The Midnight Hour” looks surprisingly good. The film was directed by Jack Bender, who primarily directed TV but would go on to make “Child's Play 3.” Despite its TV roots and obviously modest budget, Bender creates a shockingly atmospheric movie. The scene of the ghouls rising from their graves, the cemetery awash in fog, is awfully damn good. There's multiple dolly-shots, of the camera swooping through the town as various spooky or nostalgic things happen. This is exactly the kind of movie I'm an easy mark for. Not just because “The Midnight Hour” is a Halloween movie but also because it's a monster mash. Zombies descend on the town, Lucinda comes back as a vampire, and a werewolf attacks Phil and Sandy while they park at Lovers' Lane. 

No matter how slick it may look, “The Midnight House” is still a TV movie. It's creature effects are pretty damn good. The zombies are slimy, the werewolf is fearsome, and the vampires draw a little bit of blood. Yet the creatures are still more amusing than frightening. The zombies spend most of the movie making out on a couch. The town is wrecked but the violence largely takes place off-screen. The movie maintains a light-hearted, Halloween party vibe throughout. This is also obvious in its excellent soundtrack. A vampire attack in a wine cellar, where bottles shatter and vino splatters everywhere, is set to “How Soon is Now?” C.C.R., Wilson Pickett, the Guess Who, and other notable needle drops appear. Melissa gets the whole party dancing to an original number called “Get Dead,” which is pretty catchy. Also, the party's chaperon dresses up as “Let's Dance” era Bowie. Which I definitely appreciated. 

The reason Melissa gets a musical number to herself is probably because she's played by Shari Belafonte, Harry Belafonte's daughter. The Belafontes are far from the only pop culture dynasty on display here. Dedee Pfeiffer plays Mary, looking awesome in her punk rocker costume. Peter DeLuise is cast very much to type as meathead jock Mitch. (LeVar Burton is kind of wasted in his thin role though.) “The Midnight Hour” is also filled with colorful character actors. Kevin McCarthy is Mitch's asshole dad, who memorably gets zombified. Dick Van Patten shows up as a goofy dentist and Kurtwood Smith is the gruff police captain. I also found myself surprisingly invested in Phil and Sandy's romance. Maybe it's just the wish fulfillment factor of the nerdy guy getting with the cute cheerleader but this subplot is really cute and charming. Largely thanks to the chemistry between lee Montgomery and Jonna Lee.

Oh, and did I mention that Wolfman Jack is our narrator? “The Midnight Hour” originally aired on ABC, on the day right after Halloween of 1985. It re-aired a few times over the years but mostly slipped into obscurity. Anchor Bay put out a DVD but that quickly went out-of-print and now fetches high prices on eBay. If you want to see this one in 2021, you're going to have to pirate it. The movie is goofy and campy stuff, full of antiqued eighties fashion and blatant appeals to boomer nostalgia. Yet it also has surprisingly slick production values for a television film. The cast is likable and full of familiar faces. The soundtrack is a lot of fun and there's more than enough monster action to please this horror fan. This one gets a thumbs-up from me. [7/10]

The October Garden (1983)

Sometimes a title is all that's necessary to catch your attention. While looking through a list of horror shorts to watch this month, I saw “The October Garden” and immediately decided I needed to see it. This black-and-white, dialogue-free short follows a pair of little boys who are building their own haunted house in the forest. While looking for supplies, they wander into the cornfield of a defensive farmer. He blindly fires a gun into the field, killing both boys. Upon seeing that he's murdered two children, he's overcome with guilt and buries both boys in his garden. A pumpkin patch sprouts there over night. When the man tries to cut the vine, it bleeds. Soon, it becomes clear that this garden is how the boys will have their revenge. 

What “The October Garden” does best is is atmosphere. The black-and-white photography occasionally has moments of intense moodiness. The second half of the short, devoted to strange going-ons in a field at night, is rich with foggy ambiance. The music and sound design – I suspect the entire short was shot silent, with all the sound dubbed in during post – is also solid. The music ranges from sinister to nostalgic, while plenty of Halloween style sounds appear on the soundtrack. The narrative forces you to accept some unlikely behavior. What kind of person just randomly shoots into his field, once much less twice? Why isn't the farmer more freaked out when this pumpkin patch magically appears and especially when it starts bleeding and crying? Yet, since this is an E.C. Comics-style stories of revenge from beyond the grave, you kind of just have to roll with it. The way the revenge is delivered is clever, if nothing else. I always appreciate a pumpkin monster. 

There's not a lot of information about “The October Garden” online, with all of what I've been able to find coming from director Thomas Tosi's personal website. He says the film won several awards and played at international festivals. The comments on the Youtube upload informs me that it also aired on USA Network's “Night Flight,” which sounds about right. It's a well-done short, with a fable-like narrative that I can appreciate that packs in a decent amount of Halloween atmosphere in a short runtime. By the way, the film opens with a quote from Ray Bradbury. The title also sounds like something Bradbury would've written, which is probably why it attracted me so much. [7/10]