Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) 08, 10/20.

"It's October again and time for accounting another year of horror film releases on DVD. The crop's been down, owing partly to diminished disc sales overall, and the fact of known quantity chillers being offered up in past seasons. We've pretty nearly dredged the lake." Nevertheless, John McElwee finds a few highlights for the season, thanks mostly to the little studio that could - "My policy dictates that whatever is good in Hammer mitigates all that isn't" - and an event honoring a very special face: his wife "says I ignore household matters but am vitally interested in what Boris Karloff might have said on some street corner back in August 1933, to which I reply, Well, what did he say?"

Speaking of whom. Observer film critic Philip French has chosen his five "scariest films" and at the top of the list is Frankenstein, whose director, James Whale, comes in for special praise from Jonathan Lapper, too: "Now that man could direct."

"FRANKENSTEIN Night! features clips, trailers, and scenes from celebrated (and un-celebrated) Frankenstein movies, stitching together a show of about three hours." Ray Privett has details. October 27.

And of course, it's a screening of Frankenstein that sparks Ana's imagination in Victor Erice's Spirit of the Beehive, "a strangely textured, hauntingly beautiful and seductively slippery film of seemingly always fading autumnal light, mirrored images and enveloping enigma," as Josef Braun puts it. "Not unlike The Curse of the Cat People, its insight into child psychology through the examination of traumas that adult eyes never fall upon bridges the magical thinking of early childhood and the melancholy observation of movies that look to the past for knowledge of the present. It's somehow a fairy tale, a tone poem and a political allegory all at once. In short, its unforgettable, and not to be missed by anyone with a tolerance, much less a desire, for the sublime that lays in the shadows of the inexplicable."

Also: "It is for me one of those genuinely inexhaustible movies, and, though its violence pierces me only more deeply as time goes by, I find myself returning to it more than any other. Psycho, newly released on a special edition two-disc set from Universal, with a beautiful new transfer and unusually good supplements, has that crystalline character of something that yields new or richer readings or sensations with every handling."

"Toby Dammit is a genuinely apocalyptic whirlwind of a movie," writes Steve Bissette. "As his name asserts, Dammit is damned and in search of repose, respite and rest - but there's none to be found in Fellini's dizzying metropolitan inferno, as nightmarish as any ever burned into celluloid. From the clutter of claustrophobic studio spaces which are either overlit or draped in chintz, to the spare, fogbound twilight realms of the fateful, seemingly aimless final journey, Fellini is a brilliant cartographer of civilization on the brink of utter collapse." Via Tim Lucas.

"I'm wondering if anyone has any superior horror films or recent discoveries they'd recommend?" Doug Cummings has a few suggestions himself, but he's looking for more.

Eric Campos presents Film Threat's thorough overview of this weekend's Hollywood Horror, Sci-Fi & Fantasy Film Festival.

At Twitch, Collin Armstong talks with Zack Parker about Quench.

Time Out lists "Ten friendly ghost movies."

Online browsing tips. Boing Boing's David Pescovitz points to Ray Villafane's "insanely intricate pumpkin carvings." Also: Chris Berens, artist at work.

Posted by dwhudson at October 20, 2008 12:36 PM