Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) 08, 10/27.

Robert Horton on Rosemary's Baby: "The weird denizens of the Bramford and the unforgettable Dr Sapirstein are all played by Hollywood characters whose heyday was the 1930s and 40s: Elisha Cook, Jr, Sydney Blackmer, Ruth Gordon, Patsy Kelly and Ralph Bellamy.... Their identifiability as golden-age movie folk lends a touch of the fantastic, as though they constituted a movie colony looking for a pair of actors to play the leading parts in their (literally) diabolical plot."

Hollywood Bitchslap: "As a group with a wide range of tastes, coupled with not a little knowledge of the horror genre, our staff would like to share a few of our more eclectic horror favorites that might not make the cut of a 'classic,' but nevertheless have found appreciation amongst our legion of reviewers, any of which we would easily recommend you exhume for a happy Halloween."

Mark Kermode in the Observer on The Mist: "If Frank Darabont's sleeper prison favourite The Shawshank Redemption was a film about hope, then this similarly Stephen King-derived monster movie is its (equal and) opposite - a film about utter hopelessness."

A list at the AV Club: "I vant to suck your broccoli: 23 unusual vampire variations."

"I've decided to approach The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which has been written to death, from the angle of the documentary that was made about it in 1988 (and later remastered onto dvd in 2000) called The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: A Family Portrait - Revisited," writes keelsetter at Movie Morlocks. "My reasoning for this is simple enough, I think The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is genuinely horrifying, in part, because of authenticity, and [Edwin] Neal (and his Chain Saw faimly) talk about this in the Family Portrait doc."

For Newsweek, Sharon Begley looks into why about 90 percent of Americans believe, to some extent or other, in the paranormal.

Still charged with the general spirit of Toronto After Dark, Bob Turnbull lets Kevin Tenney's Brain Dead off the hook.

Twitch is still posting reviews from the festival as well.

Also catching up: At Hollywood Bitchslap, William Goss looks back to Fantastic Fest.

Online listening tip. Matt Singer and Alison Willmore: "For this Halloween week IFC News podcast, we look at the various professions and day jobs movie killers have before and during their turn to murder - everything from doctor to carnival clown - before celebrating our 100th episode, Jackie Chan-style, with violent outtakes from podcasts past."

Online viewing tip. Thrill the World, Austin: On Saturday, 881 people broke a world record by doing that zombie dance in sync to Michael Jackson's Thriller.

Posted by dwhudson at October 27, 2008 9:32 AM