House of Wax (1953)

No, not the 2005 remake that's best known for depicting the death of Paris Hilton. The first movie by this title benefits from starring an icon of the genre, Vincent Price. (I almost called it the original. That would be Mystery of the Wax Museum, also included on the disc but skipped by me.)

In 1890s England, Prof. Jarrod starts as a seemingly good if eccentric fellow, quite enamored of his own purely tasteful Madame Tussaud-style waxworks. But partner Burke, unsatisfied with the profits, decides to commit arson for insurance fraud -- leaving the uncooperative Jarrod inside for dead. It looks as tho Burke will get away with it, until a figure more disfigured than the average Phantom of the Opera kills him and makes it look like a suicide. The body disappears from the morgue. Soon after, a new wax museum under the name of Jarrod includes an exhibit on Burke, boasting the innovation of ripped-from-the-headlines morbidity in addition to more historical grotesque reenactments. It sells well, but some customers find the dummies a little too convincing....

The Conjuring (2013)

All month until now, I'd seen movies that end with a notice that the depicted characters and events are fictitious -- even Blade Runner 2049, for crying out loud. This one boasts a basis in true events, with only a few changes for entertainment's sake (e.g., compressing a decade into weeks). Such claims are especially common for horrors about exorcism, probably because more people today believe in ghosts and demons than in, say, werewolves. At any rate, we know that it is partly true, insofar as the major players (among living humans, anyway) have existed and had connections with each other; two served as consultants on the film.

The main setting is a rural Rhode Island mansion in 1971. I'm not sure why the Perron family moved into a home so old and disused without learning much about it ahead of time, but I guess two spouses and five daughters don't have many options both comfortably large and affordable. Perhaps their first warning that there are worse things in it than dust and cobwebs is that the dog adamantly refuses to enter. As phenomena get increasingly difficult to explain, the Perrons turn to demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren, perhaps best known for their part in the story that inspired The Amityville Horror. Despite their expertise, the Warrens remain apprehensive; not only do exorcisms (including those of buildings rather than people) end badly sometimes, but Lorraine recently had some unshared mental trauma that might compromise her ability. And one of the perceived entities herein threatens the Warrens' daughter elsewhere....

Don't Breathe (2016)

I think I had put this on my queue on a whim. I didn't know much about it, only that it was a moderately popular recent thriller/horror and thus a possibility for padding out my October viewings. Perhaps I was also mildly intrigued at the plot description, however simple. It certainly wasn't that the film had the same director and big-name producer as Evil Dead (2013), albeit seeking to scale back the violence.

Three young adults have been burglarizing houses, hoping to make enough money to move out of Detroit. They think one more wee-hours job will do the trick: a one-man house in an otherwise abandoned neighborhood. The homeowner is a Gulf War veteran (Stephen Lang) who gained $300K following a car accident that killed his daughter. As they case they joint, they discover that he's also blind. Sounds easy to them, but you already know the warning signs: Somebody picked the wrong house.

Carnival of Souls (1962)

Not to be confused with the unpopular 1998 remake, this is one of those flicks that bombed upon release but saw "vindication" on TV. It had a small budget and a short run time, so it must have made for easy distribution. According to the commentary, it stands out from others of its ilk by not really trying to copy anything within the genre. The makers had in mind shades of Ingmar Bergman and Jean Cocteau, who, while prone to dark eccentricity, are not exactly horror/thriller staples.

Mary is the lone survivor among three young women whose car got submerged in a lake, and no one is sure how she made it. Understandably, she moves away afterward, to the vicinity of Salt Lake City, not far from some abandoned buildings that once housed a carnival. Whatever trauma she left behind gets replaced with eerie events, especially the repeated appearance of a ghoulish man whom nobody else notices.

Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

My past experience of Blade Runner (1982) consisted of watching the Director's Cut with my dad in 2003 and the Final Cut at AFI in 2015, the latter serving only to enhance my already great appreciation. I'd also read the loose literary basis, Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, in between, helping me understand a couple aspects that hadn't gotten much explanation on screen. Thus Dad and I independently got the idea to see the sequel in a theater before long. I can't speak for his optimism, but mine was cautious, noting that (1) long waits usually mean big differences, (2) people were saying nine years ago that Harrison Ford was getting too old to reprise his action roles, (3) Ridley Scott ceded the director's chair to Denis Villeneuve, and (4) Rutger Hauer's Roy Batty couldn't appear in it.

Thirty years after the events of BR, uncannily humanoid organic robots, called "replicants," have become common and mostly legal on Earth, albeit subject to rampant bigotry. Older models, which don't all have the limited lifespan from BR, are less cooperative as slaves and thus marked for death at the hands of special forces inexplicably called "blade runners," who are at least typically replicants themselves. LAPD Officer KD6-3.7 (Ryan Gosling), usually going by "K," shows no desire to rebel -- until after the site of one of his hits reveals the fossils of a once-pregnant replicant. Since news of this possibility interferes with the public narrative that replicants are too distinct for human rights, K's boss (Robin Wright) orders him to hunt down and kill the now-adult child. His subsequent detective work continues to blow fuses in his head, metaphorically speaking; and the closer he gets, the more certain parties try to remove him from the picture....

Re-Animator (1985)

Hard to believe that this is my first time on this blog reviewing a film based on literature I'd read beforehand. Specifically, "Herbert West--Reanimator" was one of about eight H.P. Lovecraft short stories that I tried. Like most, it did very little for me. I was left to wonder why people called it comical. It turns out that neither Lovecraft nor contemporary critics were at all fond of that one, so I get the impression that "fans" just like to mock it.

After a little-discussed incident in Switzerland, med student Herbert transfers to Miskatonic University in Arkham, MA. He moves into the house of slightly more focal student Dan, who frequently wheels bodies to the morgue. After Dan stumbles on Herbert's progress at bringing dead animals back to life, he gingerly agrees to help in some less ethical efforts to try it on humans, despite what Dan's girlfriend, Megan, would say.

Hellraiser (1987)

Last month saw the 30th anniversary of the only reason I've heard of writer-director Clive Barker. All I knew going in was that a guy nicknamed Pinhead (because of the pins in his head) presented a box that could take people to hell. With a bit of a memory jog, I might have recalled that Pinhead had several less normal-looking comrades called Cenobites. Didn't sound like my thing, but the somewhat enduring cult popularity piqued my curiosity. Maybe it would surprise me in its appeal, like A Nightmare on Elm Street had.

Middle-aged Larry gets the bright idea to move into his seemingly long-abandoned former home. His wife, Julia, has reservations about it, not least because she cheated on him in that house with his brother, Frank. An accident causes Larry to bleed on the floor of an empty room, which later enables Frank to materialize from hell -- incompletely. Only Julia becomes aware at first, and Frank urges her to get him enough blood to restore his whole body so that he can run away before the Cenobites find him.

Village of the Damned (1960)

At only 77 minutes, this film would be pretty easy to rewatch right away with commentary, as I did once with another. Naturally, it gets coupled on DVD with its spiritual successor (not a sequel proper) Children of the Damned. But I decided that neither of those follow-ups was likely to be as entertaining -- and my time would be better spent writing this review.

In the beginning, everyone within the village of Midwich, England, falls unconscious for about four hours. Afterward, every Midwich woman of childbearing age is...well, they couldn't use an adjective for it on screen at the time. The offspring look human, albeit with subtly unusual and samey traits, but their mental and physical developments are rapid. Their emotional development, not so much. And they exhibit the telepathy for an essential hive mind -- not as much as Professor X, but enough to make them very hard to oppose.

House (1977)

As with my previous viewing, I was warned that this gets strange. Unlike my previous viewing, it is too escapist to make any attempt at relevance. Cracked.com described a few scenes that put it among the five weirdest horror movies they knew, and I thought it should be higher up from their description. I probably would have skipped it if not for its showing at AFI (not that I watched it there), its enduring cult, and my desire to have a good lineup for October.

A synopsis sounds ridiculously simple and hackneyed: Seven high school girls decide to take a vacation at the remote mansion of one's aunt, which, as you probably guessed, is haunted. But House (a.k.a. Hausu) is ridiculous in the finer details, to the point that I can hardly think of another picture like it. Even contemporary Japanese found it bizarre.

Get Out (2017)

This may be the first horror movie of my lifetime that my parents saw before I did. Friends had recommended it to them, and they recommended it to me. They also thought I should expect a wait on it from Netflix, which is why I put it at the top of my queue for October, but it came on time. Truth be told, I had held off on it not just because it wasn't the right month for my horror viewing but because it sounded very iffy for my taste.

The main auteur is Jordan Peele of Key & Peele fame, so I rightly suspected a racial focus. Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) goes to meet the parents (Katherine Keener and Bradley Whitford, who looks nothing like Josh Lyman anymore) of his girlfriend, Rose (Allison Williams), who assures him they'd have nothing against her dating a Black man. Ooh, but there'd been some inadequate communication: This is the day of an annual family/friend reunion, so he'll meet far more than them. He's not exactly surprised at a lot of the awkwardness from people who try to be polite yet don't seem to know any Blacks personally besides servants, but things start to seem worryingly awry, especially the Stepford-like behavior of the few other Blacks around....