Schocktoberfest 2019 Update

The Night Sitter

 A popular thing to do in the horror movie loving community is to share pre-Halloween movie lists. Not much of a planner, I am putting out my list as I watch it. So far, I am one week in with nine movies watched. Six of them were first watches, and 5 can be considered as releases.  Submitted for your approval,  a brief review of  Shockoberfest 2019 celebrations:

Shocktoberfest 2019 Begins! Rabid (1977) [Cronenberg]

This is not the first time David Cronenberg’s 1977 film  Rabid has been reviewed at the Insomniac Theater. When I wrote about it in 2010, it was as a pre-AIDS metaphor for the devastation of a sexually transmitted epidemic. This time around, I tried to look at it from a different perspective.

Twenty First Century Horror Standouts (Another list of... Post)

Reddit user ScarletBegonias79 posted a list of the top horror films of the 2010s and asked users for theirs. I decided to expand mine into a blog post.

Climax (2018) [Psychedelic, Experimental]

Director: Gaspar Noé
Writer: Gaspar Noé

Biographical note: I was ill in 2010. Much of that year I was paralyzed. I started this blog because I stopped sleeping and would stay up all night long, watching horror movies. One of those movies was  Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void (original, 2010 post here). Noé provided a handy spoiler in his own movie when a character summarizes existence after death according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead as foreshadowing of what was to come next. Ten years later, in his 2018 film Climax, Noé provides no such road map, leaving the viewer to wander through his psychedelic maze with no directions other than their own. It was an intense trip.

The Whip and the Body (1963) [Horror Romance]

Directed by  Mario Bava (as John M. Old) 

Writing Credits Ernesto Gastaldi, Ugo Guerra, and Luciano Martino

There is no doubt after watching The Whip and the Body why Mario Bava was considered a master in the use of light, color and shadow! This 55 year old film is beautiful to watch. Replete with exterior shots of sunrises and sunsets through a gray sky and over a turbulent ocean and desolate beach and moody internal shots where the subjects move through a spectrum of color with each step, this film is a treat for the eye.