31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN - Our Primary Watch List!
It is October 1st, and once again time to consider our 31 days of Halloween. Truth be told, I will personally exceed this number by more than a couple since I will be doubling up with Turner Classic Movies’s excellent month of programming, as well as some other watch parties that may be happening.
Normally, TCM would lead the charge here, but Criterion Channel has put together a delightful collection of 70s-era horror, so I decided to pick largely from there. In addition to that, we at Horrible Imaginings have a number of events, both virtual AND in collaboration with The Frida Cinema’s PopUP Drive-In series. Yes, I will be driving up to Tustin to introduce each one of those!
So let’s not dilly dally any longer! Below, you will see my list of primary films to focus on. Some of them are events we have coming up as ticket, some of them are just part of that Criterion list, and others are just titles I wanted to share. MOST of them are easily streamable. I also include my reasons for picking the titles. They will be all over the genre spectrum, from arthouse to grindhouse!
OF SPECIAL NOTE: We will have a LIVE CHATALONG edition of the absurd Italian film BURIAL GROUND: THE NIGHTS OF TERROR! If you took part in our last Chatalongs, you know this will be a BLAST! Definitely mark your calendars for that one! Film courtesy of Severin Films and the American Genre Film Archive!
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
October 1: Deathdream
This one took the least amount of thought. I saw my buddy Jeff Ritter had it to watch tonight, so I added it. It is a Bob Clark favorite of mine, and a worth way to kick the month off! Part of the Criterion Channel list.
October 2: Daughters of Darkness
Another one from Criterion Channel’s list, this psychosexual Gothic nightmare features a dramatic re-interpretation of the Elizabeth Bathory story featuring Delphine Seyrig and the one and only John Karlen (for you fellow Dark Shadows obsessives!)
October 3: Driller Killer
Ok, a ton of this list I chose based on a list of wacky national holidays in October. October 3rd is National Techie Day! In celebration, from Criterion Channel’s list, we have Abel Ferrara’s DRILLER KILLER! Ferrara himself plays this film’s techie—if you include power drills in that definition!
October 4: The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh - TICKETS HERE
Part of our Film Geeks San Diego virtual theater series of Italian Genre films, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh is a hallucinogenic Giallo from the absolute master Sergio Martino! Tickets are available NOW! The screening will include a post-film discussion with our director and Cinema Junkie Beth Accomando. Restoration courtesy of Severin Films and the American Genre Film Archive.
October 5: Race with the Devil
Peter Fonda and Warren Oates are vacationing daredevils on the run from Satanic hippies! Full of wild on-camera driving stunts featuring an RV! Also, we have another Dark Shadows alum with Lara “Angelique” Parker!
October 6: Hausu - The Frida Cinema Drive-In Dine-Out at Tustin’s Mess Hall
One of our co-presentations with The Frida Cinema! The wildly psychedelic Japanese masterpiece from Nobuhiko Obayashi, who sadly passed away in April of this year. This one is an absolute favorite, with bizarre deaths, trippy animation, a haunted house, and bizarre fruit!
October 7: TROG
It is National Inner Beauty Day! What better way to celebrate than with Joan Crawford and TROG! SEE Ms. Crawford in her antiquated Old Hollywood attire crawling around and screaming “TROG!” Part of the Criterion Channel’s list.
October 8: City of the Living Dead
It is National Fluffernutter Day! If you haven’t had it, a Fluffernutter is basically peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwich. Massachusetts was the birthplace of this half confection, half lunch food. Massachusetts is also the setting of Fulci’s notorious and nearly perfect CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD!
October 9: CAMPFIRE TALES (Tales from the Hood) - Tix to Campfire Tales HERE!
This weekend is our October edition of CAMPFIRE TALES! We have two, one-hourish blocks of exemplary short horror films! You have the whole weekend to watch them before our LIVE Discussions on Sunday the 11th. In honor of short horrors, I have decided to select anthologies for this weekend—starting with the underrated TALES FROM THE HOOD!
October 10: CAMPFIRE TALES, Kim & Ket Stay Alive…Maybe (Tales from the Darkside: the Movie) - Tix to Campfire Tales HERE!
This weekend is our October edition of CAMPFIRE TALES! We have two, one-hourish blocks of exemplary short horror films! You have the whole weekend to watch them before our LIVE Discussions on Sunday the 11th. TONIGHT we have a LIVE PODCAST from the wonderful Kim & Ket Stay Alive..Maybe! Perhaps it is giving away some of the plans for that podcast, but I have selected TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE: THE MOVIE to accompany this night!
October 11: CAMPFIRE TALES (Three Extremes) - Tix to Campfire Tales HERE!
The final day of CAMPFIRE TALES! The LIVE discussions are at 5:30pm PST and 8pm PST, respectively. Get those shorts finished in time to discuss them with the creators! To top off the weekend, I have selected an anthology that actually does NOT include the word “tales”: THREE EXTREMES!
October 12: Blood Quantum
It is FUCK COLUMBUS DAY! That’s right, we are brandishing our middle fingers to one of history’s most famous perpetuator of mass genocide! This is one of the very few films on this list made within the last couple of years. Available on Shudder, it is BLOOD QUANTUM, a zombie film featuring members of First Nations on the Red Crow Mi’gmaq reserve. Yeah, fuck you Columbus!
October 13: The Fog - The Frida Cinema Drive-In Dine-Out at Tustin’s Mess Hall
It is the 40th anniversary of one of my favorite John Carpenter films—THE FOG! This is the second of our three co-presentations of the month with The Frida Cinema at their pop-up drive-in at Tustin! This one is in-person (or in-car), so click the link above for your tickets!
October 14: The Pit
It is National Bring Your Teddy Bear to Work Day! I just had to nod to this bizarre national holiday, and what better way than with The Pit? Yet another Canadian horror film, The Pit is a bizarre coming of age tale about a young boy, his psychological tie to his creepy teddy bear, a town full of bullies, and a pit full of fuzzy monsters.
October 15: Baby Blood
It is National Pregnancy Day! There are so many films to choose for this one, but the gnarly French horror film BABY BLOOD is a rarely seen piece of exploitation. Follow Emmanuelle Escourrou as she kills to feed the creature that has crawled into her uterus!
October 16: Kuroneko
It is GLOBAL CAT DAY. Actually, there are a ton of cat-based holidays in the month of October, which I suppose is not surprising. Since this one is “global,” I went with Kaneto Shindo’s Japanese supernatural masterpiece from 1968—KURONEKO! Every frame in this film is like a painting of darkness, and it is hypnotizing! This is not on Criterion Channel’s list of 70s horror, obviously, but it IS on that channel!
October 17: Ganja and Hess
It is National Black Poetry Day! Did you know that writer/director Bill Gunn’s father William Harrison Gunn was himself a musician and poet? GANJA AND HESS is poetry in motion—a personal and traumatic story that completely subverts both the genre and what most people thought of as the mainstream Black cinema of the 70s.
October 18: Burial Ground LIVE CHATALONG! - Click here: Reserve your spot now!
As mentioned above, hold this night on your calendars to join us as we chat along LIVE with Andrea Bianchi’s absurd zombie exploitation film BURIAL GROUND: THE NIGHTS OF TERROR! All the nudity, gore, incest, zombies, outlandish dialogue, and ridiculous characters you can handle! You can pre-order this NOW for just $1 stinkin’ little dollar! It is on a sliding scale, if you want to donate to the cause! Film courtesy of Severin Films and the American Genre Film Archive
October 19: Knife + Heart
It is National LGBT Center Awareness Day! The French-Mexican co-production KNIFE + HEART, available on Shudder, is another of the more recent choices on this list. It is a film whose stunning visuals has upended how people can view the slasher subgenre.
October 20: Deep Red - The Frida Cinema Drive-In Dine-Out at Tustin’s Mess Hall
The final co-presentation of the month we are doing with The Frida Cinema at Tustin’s Mess Hall drive-in! It is the 40th anniversary of one of the most well known films in the giallo subgenre: Dario Argento’s DEEP RED! Get ready to shake along to Goblin’s phenomenal score on your car stereo as you sit and watch this film under the stars!
October 21: Alligator
It is National Reptile Day, so how could I now show ALLIGATOR? Robert Forster died a little over a year before this date on October 11, 2019, and this has always been one of those films I have a pure affection for.
October 22: La Loba
It is National Make a Dog’s Day, um…Day! Once again, there are SO many obvious titles I could choose for this—monster dog titles, rabid dog titles, super smart military dog titles, werewolf titles—but I can’t help but try to pick something that many of you might not have seen before. We just wrapped the San Diego Latino Film Festival, and we showed a wonderful 1935 Mexican horror called El Fantasma del Convento. I decided to pick another from my repertoire of classic Mexican horror: from 1964, we have LA LOBA! It stars Kitty de Hoyos and El Fantasma del Convento’s Joaquín Cordero in a story about a woman with lycanthropy!
October 23: The Mole Men
It’s National Mole Day. There was really no choice, but to show The Mole Men. Truly, I love this wacky center-of-the-earth movie, which features one of my favorite opening science lectures!
October 24: Season of the Witch
A rarely seen and often misunderstood George A. Romero film that the Criterion Channel has added to their 70s Horror list. Romero was a true master and is desperately missed. Get this one finished early in the day, because The Frida Cinema’s 4th annual CAMP FRIDA is happening virtually for 12 straight hours all night!
October 25: Theatre of Blood
It is “Sourest Day.” I liked the name of this one. From one description of the holiday: “If life is giving you lemons or you feel like a grumpy Gus, this day is for you. Take your glass-half-full attitude and spread the joy…er, gloom. Smiles be banished! Replace them all with pouts and terrible frowns.“ In THEATRE OF BLOOD, Vincent Price, in one of my favorite of his roles, plays an actor who turns his own frown upside down by murdering his critics with Shakespeare-themed crimes! This film also features the incredible Diana Rigg, who we just lost, so it doubles as a tribute! Part of the Criterion Channel’s list!
October 26: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
It is National Mincemeat Day! I was hoping there would be a perfect one for one of the greatest of all horror films—THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE! Tobe Hooper’s magnum opus still manages to shock and traumatize audiences, even though it chooses to show almost no actual viscera. You think you see it—and that is much worse. Bring the fam!
October 27: The Black Cat
It is National Black Cat Day! Time for my personal favorite of the original Universal Horrors—and it has no supernatural monsters! Edgar Ulmer’s expressionistic re-fabrication of Edgar Allan Poe’s short horror features the dynamic duo of monstordom Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff as competing post-WWI madmen with a newlywed couple caught in the middle. This is a pre-code film that takes FULL advantage of the notion of pre-code!
October 28: Horror Hospital
It’s National Internal Medicine Day, and it would also be a travesty to have no films featuring Michael Gough, so here we go—HORROR HOSPITAL! Gough plays a mad doctor who lobotomizes hippies and turns them into mindless zombies. How can you go wrong?
October 29: Death Line
It is National Hermit Day! DEATH LINE isn’t about hermits, really—at least not by choice! Another UK horror film, what we have here are 19th century workers who survived a cave-in and became a tribe of tunnel-dwelling cannibals! Donald Pleasance is the inspector on the case!
October 30: The Babadook
For Halloween, we have a special virtual screening of an anthology of horror films directed by Australian women. To lead up to that, I decided it was a good time to re-visit one of the most popular recent films directed by an Australian woman: Jennifer Kent’s THE BABADOOK! Plus, I will get to finally open my LGBT rainbow flag version of the blu-ray cover!
October 31: Dark Whispers Vol. 1 - Get tickets here! One a sliding scale, starting at $8!
Dark Whispers is Australia’s first women’s horror anthology feature film comprised of ten disturbing tales for the wayward and the wary. The anthology spotlights some of the most promising female genre directors in Australia and is a vehicle to present these women to industry both in Australia and internationally as ‘ones-to-watch’. Dark Whispers has strong representation with directors from indigenous, Asian and Middle Eastern backgrounds and representing 6 of the 8 states and territories from across Australia. The film will be available virtually from noon on Hallween to 9:30pm on Sunday, November 1st! We have a LIVE DISCUSSION with the filmmakers at 8pm PST on Sunday, November 1st! Don’t miss it!
Well, that’s it! We have our movie eyes ready and willing to subject themselves to a month of horrors! Oh, who are we kidding? We do this year round!