Halloween 2025: October 1st

Witchboard (1986)

The concept of using a little piece of wood, commonly called a “planchette,” to communicate with otherworldly spirits dates back to at least the 5th century, when the Chinese concept of “fuji” (spirit writing) is first documented. A board with letters written on it was added sometime around 1100 AD. These “talking boards” really caught on during the spiritualist movement of the 1800s. That is when medium Helen Peters Nosworthy coined the term “Ouija,” which she claims the board itself chose and meant “Good luck.” It doesn't. In fact, “ouija” doesn't actually mean anything. It is a simple party trick, in which the unconscious muscle twitches of multiple people's hands work together to move a trinket around. This has been understood as early as 1852 but the belief that the Ouija board – a copyrighted brand name since 1890 that's currently owned by Hasbro – allows anyone to talk to supernatural intelligences persist. Christian religious organizations have derided the game as divination, occultic, and Satanic. There's been movements to ban their sale as recently as 2010. This connection with demonic forces was mostly popularized by “The Exorcist” but plenty of other horror films have capitalized on the idea. Such as Kevin S. Tenney's 1986 cult favorite, “Witchboard.” 

Med school drop-out Jim lives with his rich girlfriend, Linda. She invites Brandon – her ex and Jim's former childhood best friend – over for a party. Brandon is an avowed spiritualist and believes he has contacted with the spirit of a dead boy named David. To prove his beliefs, he brings a Ouija board along with him. He warns Linda to never use the board by herself before seeming to successfully speaking with David... Until Jim enrages the spirit and drives him off. After accidentally leaving the board behind, Linda carelessly attempts to contact David by herself. At the same time, at Jim's construction day job, a co-worker of his dies in a violent accident. Afterwards, Linda begins to act strangely. She believes herself to be pregnant. However, as the unusual behavior and violent deaths continue, Brandon becomes slowly convinced that Linda is being possessed by an evil spirit. He teams up with Jim to uncover the truth and learn the identity of the demonic being vexing them. 

“Witchboard” was the feature debut of Kevin S. Tenney, who began writing the script while still in film school. Tenney was inspired by “The Exorcist” to begin researching Quija boards, so he was doubtlessly aware of the many possession movies that followed. Linda's increasing entrapment by the villainous spirit shows in slow changes in her behavior, such as her swearing more, before escalating to weird nightmares and full-blown poltergeist activity. All stuff we've seen before but “Witchboard” injects some freshness into these ideas by combining them with other tropes. There are “Evil Dead”-style point-of-view shots of an anomalous force observing the household, which goes a long way towards selling the idea of an evil being attaching itself to these people. (The cinematography is overall fairly atmospheric, with some nice foggy moments.) There's also a heavy dose of slasher flick in “Witchboard.” The best sequence in the film involves a psychic being stalked through her house before winding up impaled on a sun dial. It's a ghost that's responsible for the killings but could just as easily by a masked lunatic in these scenes. By the end, “Witchboard” has even assigned a slasher movie villain style name, appearance, and gimmick to its villain. 

While the film adds some freshness to familiar concepts by mixing and matching ideas, what makes “Witchboard” really work is the dynamics between the characters. A love triangle is immediately established, with Brandon having his arm around Linda in the first scene despite Jim being her partner. The two guys basically spend every minute up to this point bickering with each other. The suggestion seems to be that highly educated Brandon doesn't believe blue collar guy Jim is good enough for Linda. While the woman is often the point of contention between the two men, she is increasingly not present whenever they are argue. Jim and Brandon start spending a lot of time together. By the last third, they are staying in a hotel room together, Brandon laughing at Jim's jokes. This follows a moment where Jim, wearing an unbutton plaid shirt over his hairy chest, puts his hand on Brandon's shoulder and stares deeply into his eyes. It seems unlikely that a homoerotic subtext was intended but the bond between the men is what actually drives the story. Their childhood friendship is only briefly mentioned in dialogue, making their progress seem more like angry dick-measuring between rivals accidentally awakening something deeper. 

Also furthering this reading of the film is the apparent sexual tension between Todd Allen and Stephen Nichols as Brandon. Todd plays Jim as a frequently sarcastic guy who hides his deep pain behind dry jokes. Todd has a laid-back persona and decent chemistry with everyone in the film. Nichols, meanwhile, has a strangely flat affect and often bellows in overblown ways. The two styles, one relaxed and the other belabored, weirdly compliment each other. Tawny Kitaen, cast right before she shook her ass on the hood of Whitesnake's car and become an eighties sex symbol, actually gives a decent performance too. When possessed by a demon – and putting on a man's clothes, so there's more fuel for a queer subtext – her performance gets very silly. This is a factor all throughout “Witchboard.” Most obviously present in the casting of Kathleen Wilhoite as “Zarabeth,” a medium with a New Wave fashion and a very annoying sense of humor. But I don't know. I kind of like Zarabeth. There's a casual silliness to many of the supporting characters in “Witchboard” – such as that goof-ball co-worker who ends up under some slate rock – that adds an easy-going energy to the entire film. The cast is all over the place but I like it that way. 

If there's any one flaw with “Witchboard,” it is a need to do too much. Tenney's script presents a number of interesting ideas that never amount to much in the story. Jim toiling as a construction worker while his girlfriend is seemingly independently wealthy and his rival/friend has clear blue blood connections introduces an element of class. This becomes more apparent once we learn that Jim came from a neglectful household. Early on, the idea is presented that ghostly spirits can choose who they want to be their parents in their next lives. Does this mean Jim chose his screw-up parents? The implication seems to be that ghostly David wants Linda to become his new mother but that plot thread is abruptly dropped before the end. Alongside a largely useless subplot about a detective convinced Jim is responsible for the murders, not forming some of its more subtextual ideas into concrete themes is a definite flaw here.

Being too ambitious is not the worst thing a horror film can be, especially when it has such a fun, relaxed ambiance to it like “Witchboard” does. I discovered the movie during a time when I would watch any eighties horror movie I could find, going in knowing absolutely nothing about it. This is exactly the kind of lack of expectations that causes a film like this to succeed. Never really scary or tense but undeniably chummy and comfortable, it is cleverly directed, has enough twists to keep you compelled, keeps a sense of humor about itself, and is a bit smarter than it needed to be. Oh, by the way, the film was originally entitled “Ouija” and even used a Parkers Brothers board game before someone realized that was a trademarked term. “Witchboard” is a cooler title if you ask me but all those insert shots of generic talking board are impossible not to notice once you see them. [7/10]

247°F (2011)

In my opinion, everybody is, to some degree, claustrophobic. It is simply the human survival instinct. We all know that we need oxygen to live. The smaller an area we are inside, the less available air there is, the more we start thinking about running out. Perhaps it triggers, in all of us, some primordial fear of being buried alive. A number of horror movies have come along, mostly in the last twenty years, attempting to capitalize on this universal anxiety. That such a premise also means only a single location would be needed for production surely is a factor in why this idea has become so catchy to low budget filmmakers. This has resulted in multiple motion pictures about people stuck in cars, elevators, and water of varying depths. An increasing need for novelty has led to confined space thrillers with more and more specific locations. Such as a high-tech cryo-chamber or a fuckin' tube in the ground. Or, as in the case of one of the few horror movies made in the Eurasian nation of Georgia, a sauna. How about we strip down, sweat it out, and give 2011's “247°F” a shot?

Jenna and her fiance were in a car crash. He was left dead and she was deeply traumatized. A year later, she travels with her friends – couple Renee and Michael, nice guy Ian – to the Georgian countryside for the Victory Day celebration. There, they meet another friend, Wade, who has built a vacation cabin near a lake. The wooden structure includes an old fashion sauna. As the quartet kill time before a party that night, they decide to strip down to their underwear and relax in the balmy heat of the sauna. Michael has too much to drink, argues with Renee, and storms out... Without realizing he's dropped a ladder in front of the sauna door, blocking it off and trapping his friends inside. He then leaves to meet Wade for a fireworks demonstration. With no one coming to their aide, and seemingly no way out of the heated room, Jenna, Renee, and Ian will have to find some way to survive before they swelter to death. 

Confined space thrillers are clever ideas, in the sense that they play on common fears and turn a single location into an asset. Unfortunately, justifying how exactly people could get stuck in spaces as unlikely as a ski lift or an ATM booth often necessitates some implausible story choices. "247°F" is supposedly inspired by a true story, though I can't locate any news article about the events. The initial set-up, of a blockage tumbling into the path of the sauna door and trapping people inside, seems like something that probably could happen. Making the guy responsible a drunken lout of such inconsiderate idiocy that he would never think to look back is certainly not outside the realm of dumb-ass shit people do. But it's starting to push it. From there, "247°F" has to repeatedly emphasize how isolated the trio inside are and how the mechanics of the sauna function, in order to prolong danger. The handle to open the door from the outside can't be reached after bashing out the window with a sauna rock and Ian can't just kick the sturdy door down. Sure. The thermostat being set up in such a way that no one can access it starts to feel like bullshit. By the time "247°F" has fireworks going off right at the same time Wade's dog barks to alert his owner to the screams coming from his cabin, things have officially gotten contrived. When a script has to increasingly pile up the unlikely events to prolong its story to feature length, eyes are bound to roll. 

While setting most of your movie entirely within one room is a smart way to stretch a minuscule budget, it presents other challenges. Namely, how do you get eighty-eight minutes of story out of such a limited location? After a while, the movie is going to be nothing but people sitting around and sweating to death, right? Lloyd S. Wagner's script fills time with numerous escape attempts. A broken ladle shoved into a light socket or someone going crazy and tackling the stove seem like desperate reaches. Mostly, "247°F" pads things out by relying on the worst cliche of low budget horror movies: The characters childishly bickering about past grievances while trapped in a life-or-death situation. Christina Ulloa plays Renee as a self-centered type that gets increasingly bitchy as the film goes on. By the time she's verbally attacking Jenna for not being a present enough friend while processing the death of her fiance, any sympathy you might have had for this character is long gone. She's a schoolyard bully and you do not care of she lives or dies. Not that Jenna is much better. She is so thoroughly trapped in her trauma as to be a non-entity, spending most of the movie curled up in a ball and whimpering. Scout Taylor-Compton never makes the character more than a panicked ball of exaggerated mental torment that she never reads as a real person. Far too much of "247°F" depends on its characters simply being awful to each other. Which does not make the viewer want to be stuck in a boiling sauna with them for any amount of time. Nor does it make the final image, a last ditch attempt at sentimentality, believable. 

In general, "247°F" gives the impression of a rather slapped together affair. The script requires far too many difficult to believe events to be swallowed. The characters are shallow and unlikable. The acting is hammy. The movie repeatedly cuts away to Wade – played by the second cast member from Rob Zombie's "Halloween" in this film, Tyler Mane – doing inconsequential stuff like smoking a joint. It might have simply been the copy streaming on Tubi but the sound mixing seemed off to me, the music often blaring over the dialogue. Cinematographer Vigen Vartanov shoots the entire movie in a flat, blandly lit fashion that makes it look like a soap opera. The slow fades to black used repeatedly between scenes do not dissuade this impression. The use of some less than convincing CGI in the last third is the final sign you need that "247°F" was a somewhat shoddy production, either falling short of the money or creativity necessary to truly make this idea work. 

The more I watched the film, another idea occurred to me. Setting nearly your entire movie in a sauna is also a reason to keep your cast in their underwear, shiny and sleek with sweat, for most of the runtime. I guess the lack of sleazy discomfort, what with the displayed flesh being equal opportunity and the lack of any blatantly pervy camera angles, is a check in the pro columns for "247°F." (Or not, depending on what you're looking for.) Co-director Beqa Jguburia has no other credits of note but Levan Bakhia also made "Landmine Goes Click," another film with a similar confined premise. That one got slightly better reviews though seems to suffer a lot of the same flaws as this one. It's a noble mission, to make a thriller stuck in one perilous location, but it takes a lot of cleverness to overcome those limitations too. There's a Finnish movie about a scary sauna too. Maybe I should've watched that one instead... [4/10]

 

Alien: Earth: Neverland

They've been threatening to bring the personal space invaders of the “Alien” franchise to Earth since that incredibly misleading teaser trailer for “Alien 3,” with the idea serving the basis for a proposed fifth entry for many years.  Meanwhile, a television program set within the “Alien” universe has been considered as far back as the release of the original. At one point, a Saturday morning cartoon show based on “Aliens” got so far into development that the accompanying toyline saw release even when the series didn't. Discounting a crossover nobody likes to talk about and a promotional web series for a video game, neither idea came to fruition. However, after Disney consumed 20th Century Fox, the latter studio's sci-fi/horror properties have been a high priority for them. Expanding that cinematic universe means a big budget television series to fill out cable networks and streaming service portfolios. Noah Hawley, who previously succeeded in developing unlikely intellectual properties into successful TV shows, was given the reins to “Alien” a few years back. After much delay, “Alien: Earth” finally debuted last August. Despite being massively let down by the last movie, I'm still invested enough in this name-brand to give the show a look. 

Set before the original film, “Alien: Earth” begins aboard a Weyland-Yutani vessel sent out into the depths of space to retrieve some hostile foreign shapes. Naturally, that pesky dick-head gets out and runs amok. The ship crashes on Earth, in the city of New Siam which resides on a stretch of land owned by the Prodigy mega-corp. A team of soldiers are sent in to retrieve any valuable tech contained within. Prodigy is at the forefront of “hybrid” technology, which involves transferring human consciousness into robot bodies. A near-by island is laboratory for these experiments. Wendy, a terminally ill girl now residing in an android adult body, is the first test subject. Upon learning that her long lost brother Joe is among the soldiers sent into New Siam to investigate the crash, she insists on looking into it. The only survivor from the wreck was the vessel's resident cyborg... The only human survivor anyway...

Much like “Alien: Romulus” and most modern legacy sequels, the first episode of “Alien: Earth” shows an almost fetishistic devotion to replicating the superficial aesthetic of the original movie. The first scene features the title slowly forming out of hash marks, a crew awakening from cryo-sleep aboard an industrial space-ship, and a soundalike for Jerry Goldsmith's “Alien” score. The difference between seventies screenwriting and modern, corporate-approved storytelling kicks in during the following lunch scene. That's when, in some extremely unnatural expositionary dialogue, it is revealed that five different mega-corps have split up ownership of Earth's continents and the various intergalactic colonies. This follows opening on-screen titles explaining the difference between cyborgs, androids, and hybrids. All of this strikes me as an extremely bad omen. This show has eight hours to fill. They couldn't let the world-building naturally develop throughout the series? We had to know all that shit right away? 

This is, no doubt, the side of my brain that is extremely cynical about all modern television speaking. “Neverland” – the first of many “Peter Pan” references here – does contain some of the big sci-fi ideas that the “Alien” franchise is known for. An interest in trans-humanism is already evident in this first episode. What with the idea of sickly dying kids having their brains transported into immortal robot bodies. A throwaway line mentions that Wendy's cybernetic form doesn't pump with the same hormones as your average teenage girl's body would, meaning her emotional reactions are different. That's a side of being a robot I never considered. Mostly, Wendy's inhuman nature is displayed in how she longs to re-connect with her flesh and blood brother, which is also explained through some belabored dialogue. Sydney Chandler seems to have a compelling screen presence, at the very least. The show is already contrasting Wendy's more personable brand of robo-humanism with the colder synthetics around her. 

“Alien” isn't only a science fiction series though. It's also horror. How does “Neverland” function in that regard? Well, the one sequence devoted to a Xenomorph ripping it up aboard the descending ship does generate some suspense. We have zero investment in these characters so far but the cyborg being very close to getting chomped on is cool. The shots of corporate marines poking around a ruined city are more standard issued. There's some weird slug thing crawling into a dude's mouth and lots of lurking in shadowy, industrial settings. I can already feel which of these story threads are going to bore the fuck out of me as this show goes on. Also, it bugs me how Disney-owned movies pop up in the background here. As if the show can't hold back for a minute to remind us that “Alien: Earth” was made by the same studio that owns “Peter Pan” and “Ice Age.” [6/10] 

Freddy's Nightmares: Do You Know Where Your Kids Are?
 

Based on the previous evidence I have gathered, I am confident in saying that “Freddy's Nightmares” was a bad television show. Nevertheless, every October, I find myself returning to it. “Do You Know Where Your Kids Are?,” the tenth episode of the second season, is currently the highest rated installment on IMDb, for whatever that is worth. The first half concerns Lisa, a teenage girl who agrees to take over a babysitting gig for her friend. Upon arriving at the house, she makes a disturbing discovery: The family seemingly keeps their eldest daughter locked up in the basement, treating her anguished screams as a normal occurrence. The second half follows Lisa's mother who has gone a little crazy since her daughter's apparent death in a car crash. That's when the girl, having escaped from the basement, arrives at the home and attempts to assume Lisa's life. Or, at least, that's what I think happened. 

See, “Do You Know Where Your Kids Are?” is one of those “Freddy's Nightmares” that functions as a sequel to a previous episodes. I haven't seen “Bloodlines,” the story this one is following up on. I don't think that would make the second half anymore coherent though. See, a reoccurring problem I've noticed with “Freddy's Nightmares” is that the show repeatedly felt the need to re-enforce the “nightmare” aspect of its premise. Each episode had to feature dreams in some way. In this episode, the protagonists of both segments repeatedly drift in and out of dreams. It gets tot eh point that the viewer is repeatedly unsure of what scenes are reflecting reality and which are dreams. That becomes especially confusing in the second half. The story seems to be about the spirit of trapped girl trying to convince Lisa's mom to murder her. However, constantly jumping back and forth between jump-scare dream scenes and actually relevant information means I was never sure what the fuck was actually happening. 

The first half of “Do You Know Where Your Kids Are?” is better, if only because it actually has a concrete premise. The idea of a teenage girl showing up for a routine babysitting job, only to discover some weird shit, is a classic horror movie premise. Considering “A Nightmare on Elm Street” has always been about the suppressed traumas of suburbia, the idea that a seemingly normal family has a whole Bertha Mason situation going on behind closed doors is potent stuff. As previously established, “Freddy's Nightmares” had the production values of pornography and a writing staff composed entirely of people with CTE. Meaning this script leaps between an onward moving plot and stupid nightmare scenes that go nowhere. Lisa has a bad habit of falling asleep on the job, it seems. There was potential here but no time, skill, or effort behind it. Having said that, Freddy's host segments do provide some extremely cheesy one-liners from Robert Englund. Why couldn't this whole show have been Freddy running his own version of “Pee-Wee's Playhouse” out of his boiler room? That would've been funnier. [4/10]