What We Do in the Shadows (2014)

I wasn't sure I could still enjoy mockumentaries, as the last one I did was A Mighty Wind in 2003. Sacha Baron Cohen struck me as largely tasteless, and shows like The Office and Parks and Recreation turned me off in no time -- something about the combination of social awkwardness and shaky cameras, I guess. Was it them, or had I changed? Regardless, a focus on vampires promised something different.

Netflix describes the theme as three vampire housemates, but for most of the movie, four or five share the house. These five are all men who somehow wound up in Wellington, New Zealand. Don't ask me why they agreed to be filmed when they otherwise try to keep their vampirism a secret. By agreement, the cameramen carry crosses just in case, but vampires aren't the only supernatural danger to turn up....

The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)

This tends to get classified as sci-fi rather than horror, as befits what we think of '50s flicks, but the premise sounded pretty scary to me. Unlike Ant-Man or the Atom, the protagonist herein does not shrink voluntarily, nor does he regrow. And as the poster shows (although that exact moment never happens), his experience should not be watched by arachnophobes. I'm not one, but even knowing about the spider, I gasped when it appeared.

What I didn't know going in was how gradual and accidental the whole affair was. Scott just happens to be the only person exposed to a radioactive mist at sea. Neither he nor his wife Louise notices anything wrong for six months. You might call the slowness merciful -- it's not like he suddenly finds himself naked -- but it does no favor for his attitude. For the first maybe half of the movie, he is feasibly short, if infeasibly proportioned for that height (as is the alleged circus midget he meets), garnering unwelcome fame. By the time he can live in a dollhouse, he has to worry about forces of nature such as the household cat and...well, see above.

Hocus Pocus (1993)

A few years ago, I was surprised to see an article listing many reasons that this was the #1 Halloween flick. I hadn't even heard about it since I saw the trailer in a theater. Besides, it had a middling rating on IMDb and a green splat on Rotten Tomatoes. But after encountering multiple citations of the haunting pseudo-lullaby "Come, Little Children," and simply not having a lot of Halloween-type movies on my Netflix queue, I decided to give it a try.

After a setup conveniently set exactly 300 years before the rest of the movie, we see teen Max (Omri Katz) missing L.A. now that he's moved to bully-infested Salem. His bratty but ultimately likable sister, Dani (Thora Birch), strong-arms him into accompanying her for trick-or-treating. When he sees an opportunity to get closer to his crush, Allison (Vinessa Shaw), the three of them break into an abandoned museum that had been the home of the Sanderson sisters -- Winnifred (Bette Midler), Sarah (Sarah Jessica Parker), and Mary (Kathy Najimy) -- before they were hanged for murderous witchcraft. Max doubts the folklore until after he follows instructions to revive the weird trio. The young heroes must prevent them from draining the life force from any kids before the resurrection spell wears off at dawn. Their only ally is Thackery, a former teen interloper cursed to eternal life as a black cat.

Kwaidan (1964)

Yup, another 1960s horror set in feudal Japan already. But there are key differences, starting with the fact that this piece is a compilation of four stories, with no recurring characters between them. I hadn't seen a film like that since before I started this blog.

Might as well summarize them in order of presentation. In "Black Hair," a samurai gets a divorce against his wife's pleas, not because there's anything wrong with their relationship, but because he's seen an opportunity to marry into wealth; as you can imagine, he lives to regret it. In "The Woman in the Snow," a frosty demoness spares a man's life on the condition that he never tell anyone about her, which gets tempting when he falls for a reminiscent beauty. In "Hoichi the Earless," a blind shamisen player gets unknowingly solicited by ghosts to play a ballad about the battle that killed them, prompting his caretakers to fear for his place in the land of the living. In "In a Cup of Tea," a samurai sees a face clearly not his own reflection in (wait for it) a cup of tea, and his reaction does not please the owner of that face....

The Lodger (1944)

The earliest movie by this title, from 1927, was the only Hitchcock silent I've seen. That had been a modernized (for the time) take on a Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes novel based on Jack the Ripper. The 1944 film must be more faithful to the source material, as it takes place in the Whitechapel district of London in the late 19th century.

The presumably titular lodger (Laird Cregar) goes by Mr. Slade. While the infamous murder spree is in full swing, he manages to find on short notice an available flat owned by the Bontings (Cedric Hardwicke and Sara Allgood). Another lodger, incidentally, is Kitty Langley (Merle Oberon), an up-and-coming musical actress. In the course of investigation, John Warwick (George Sanders) of Scotland Yard meets and develops mutual feelings for Kitty, hoping especially to protect her from the Ripper.

Day of Wrath (1943)

Ah, Carl Theodor Dreyer, it's been a while. When you're not dabbling in artistic horror, I can count on you for some sort of religious message. This film, based on a play, is more drama than horror, but it seemed appropriate for my October lineup due to a focus on witches.

It's set in 1623 small-town Denmark, which apparently had the same problem as 1692 Salem. Early on, a woman begs Rev. Absalon to get her off the hook for alleged witchcraft, as he did for his eventual mother-in-law. He shows concern only for her soul, not her life, even when she threatens blackmail if not a posthumous curse. The thought weighs heavily on him after her execution, but it's rather incidental to his most immediate problem: His young wife, Anne, who apparently married him for convenience and not love, falls for his son from a previous marriage. What's more, Absalon's mother has suspected from the get-go that Anne takes after her mother in wickedness.

Army of Darkness (1992)

It's unusual for me to watch a threequel (well, third entry, anyway) before either of its predecessors. Perhaps I was tempted by the title, which suggests a big departure from the unappealingly named The Evil Dead and Evil Dead II. I've mentioned my concerns that director Sam Raimi tends toward more grotesque violence than I like, but I heard that this outing was relatively comedic.

What I had missed was the setting. Apparently, tampering with the mysterious forces associated with the Necronomicon tome not only arouses the wrath of the undead; it can open a time portal. Protagonist Ash (Bruce Campbell) gives us a brief synopsis of his past troubles to explain how he came to be chained up in the Middle Ages. Fortunately, his modern technology, knowledge, and general badassery get him out of immediate trouble and into good graces. Unfortunately, he's not quite sharp enough to reuse the tome properly. Soon he brings danger to the castle of one Lord Arthur (not necessarily the king; Ash estimates the year 1300) and must decide whether he cares enough, particularly for one Lady Sheila (Embeth Davidtz), to help rather than flee.

The Cabin in the Woods (2012)

I confess I did not really watch the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series, let alone the movie. Only with Firefly did I become a mild fan of Joss Whedon. It made sense for him to return to writing horror, with past comrade Drew Goddard, for a bit; in other genres, he loves to kill at least one of the heroes eventually.

If the title sounds awfully generic for horror, that's deliberate. It's no spoiler to say that this movie combines dozens of classics and not-so-classics of the genre...with The Truman Show. A secret, possibly government agency is basically making a scare-by-number horror flick featuring five young adults (the only actor among them you're likely to know is Chris Hemsworth), who thought it'd be fun to camp off the grid, unaware that they're being manipulated to engineer their deaths...at first. We see plenty of scenes at HQ, where the humans (among them Bradley Whitford and Sigourney Weaver) seem like ordinary people aside from their lack of sympathy for the victims. How could they do this? Well...

Onibaba (1964)

After enjoying Kuroneko last year, this seemed like a good follow-up: another Japanese horror in which a rural young woman and her mother-in-law, in the absence of their husband/son in wartime, kill numerous samurai. Judging from the Netflix jacket, the key differences were that (1) the women in Onibaba aren't ghosts and (2) they kill not for revenge but for provisions from selling the samurai equipment. (They make it look easy, thanks largely to their high-grassed home turf.)

It turns out that this summary tells us nothing we couldn't get from the first couple scenes. The plot really begins when neighbor Hachi (not that one) returns AWOL, reporting that he barely escaped from a battle that claimed their husband/son's life. Hachi courts the nameless young woman, against the express wishes of the elder. I had correctly surmised that the title translates to "Demonic Old Woman"....

The Road (2009)

As long-time readers of my blog may recall, I like to set October aside for movies that befit Halloween one way or another. Unfortunately, the first disc I received this month was unplayable, so I searched my streaming list and found it sparse on anything like horror. This looked like my best bet.

You'd guess from the bland title that it was a road trip feature, but it seems to me that no actual road gets much screen time. It's a post-apocalyptic drama, which can't help taking on facets of a thriller at times. Neither the movie nor the Cormac McCarthy book on which it's based specify the cause, but we see plenty of dead trees, few nonhuman animals, and no signs of future tech. The protagonists, an unnamed man (Viggo Mortensen) and his unnamed son (Kodi Smit-McPhee, who later starred in ParaNorman), make a trek southward to survive a winter without fuel. Along the way, they must beware other people, who are likely to rob them or do much, much worse....

The Verdict (1982)

On the rare occasions that I watch a movie again, I usually don't bother to review it here. But this was a still rarer occasion: I had basically no memory of it. Only the ending even remotely rang a bell. Good thing I remembered enjoying it years ago.

Frank Galvin (late-middle-aged Paul Newman), a discredited lawyer who spends more time on drinking and pinball than cases, finally gets a good opportunity via a friend (Jack Warden). A hospital has left a woman comatose, allegedly through an anesthetic procedure botched by negligence. Everyone, including Frank, expects him to accept on the family's behalf a pretty generous settlement; but after seeing the patient himself, he decides he'd rather try to expose their malpractice. This is not easy, because the doctors and their lawyers are far more renowned -- and can fight dirty.