Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) 08, 10/3.

Fiddle. Even though I used it last year, I like Bowie's title too much to trade it in for another, so here we go, another October, another (slightly less than) a month's worth of Halloween-themed entries. I don't know if I've simply been wrapped up in other matters or if most folks have other worries this time around, but there doesn't seem to be quite as much going on in the monster department this year.

Regardless, Not Coming to a Theater Near You is conducting a little experiment for their fifth annual "31 Days of Horror" special:

We devised an interactive database of horror films for our writers to sift though—a database of several hundred, mostly unknown and unheralded titles containing information available only on the boxes of the original VHS tapes, along with scans of both the front and back covers. The selections vary greatly in their countries of origin, run times, and ratings, but all are classifiably horror, and not one was made in the past decade. We asked our writers to browse the database as they would the shelves of a video store, refraining from employing any outside research, basing their selections on only what is on the sleeve. The end result is an attempt to reprise the now outmoded practice of browsing—to select without the burden of information, to watch with little knowledge of what you're going to see, and to ensure the potential for discovery.

So far: Cullen Gallagher on The Dead Don't Die, David Carter on The Brides Wore Blood and Stephen Snart on Alligator.

Once again, Phil Morehart fires up "31 Days of Horror Clips" at Facets Features.

Arbogast is celebrating "31 Screams" (so far: Valerie Hobson, Venetia Stevenson and Olga Bisera) and pointing to more Halloweenish action going on at The Kind of Face You Hate and No Smoking in the Skull Cave as well as to Jonathan Lapper's October Kill Fest.

David Lowery: "I'll happily defend just about every aspect of Tomas Alfredson's Låt Den Rätte Komma In [Let the Right One In] - even the cat scene, even the punchline of the climactic shot that could technically be deemed in bad taste - and I'm just as pleased to declare it a quite nearly perfect bit of genre filmmaking."

"To me, the finest vampire movie of modern times is Kathryn Bigelow's 1987 cult classic Near Dark," writes James Rocchi, "a vampire movie that roughly wrenches itself free from the pop-culture preconceptions you normally find wrapped around the sub-genre, that smashes up Western and horror film imagery and ideas to create a distinctively dark hybrid of a film, a vampire movie so eager to challenge your expectations that it doesn't even have the word 'vampire' in it."

Posted by dwhudson at October 3, 2008 11:53 AM