October Horror Film Reviews

Here's a list of horror films I watched and reviewed for October 2012. The films were chosen based on my own personal history with the genre. I chose films that scared me or were a part of my film viewing as a kid growing up. It begins with Terror Train, presumably the first horror film I ever saw when I was 3, and ends with Scream, which is something of a demarcation point after which the genre started to change from how I remembered it, but also a point after which I changed, 1996 being my first year away at college and beginning to put away childish things.

This October series started in my mind earlier this year with the idea that I would revisit all the Friday the 13th movies, rating and listing all the deaths (a silly project idea I had many years ago). I then thought I might revisit a few other horror films ahead of Halloween and post several horror reviews. It then expanded to the idea of reviewing enough horror films I remember from my childhood so that I could post one review a day for a month, possibly finishing with a review of Halloween on the 31st. In compiling a list of horror films that affected me while I was a child, I kept coming up with more films - some that were significant influences and others that were sort of background noise. Throughout the month of October as I wrote and watched, I continued to come up with more and more films. So in the end I have not quite covered everything, but pretty close.

The Exorcist (1973) - This is probably worth including for two reasons: it helped usher in a new era of horror filmmaking because of its box office and critical success and it was a horror film I knew a lot about even if I never really saw it as a child. I may have seen parts of it (or maybe just clip packages). The head spinning around and vomiting pea soup was quite famous and something my sister used to reference a lot. Maybe this was one horror film my parents correctly refused to allow me to see as a child.
The Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) - I've never seen this film and it played no part in my childhood. I mention it only because the first film was such a significant influence that this couldn't exactly go unnoticed.
The Exorcist III (1990) - I mostly just remember seeing ads for this film when it came to HBO in the early 90s. Apart from that it means nothing to me and I've never seen it.
The Omen (1976) - This one had very little impact on me except that there was a little family joke that I was Damian because I bore a slight resemblance to him and I was a terribly misbehaved child at home. But I didn't actually see this film or even know much about it until well into adulthood when I finally got hold of a DVD.
The Amityville Horror (1979) - This is another movie that was always part of the horror conversation while I was growing up, especially because the famed Amityville house is on Long Island, where I grew up. But I've never actually seen this movie. It was the sequel that I remember parts of.
Amityville II: The Possession (1982) - This is the film that is based on the events that took place in Amityville, Long Island, in which a young man murdered his entire family. I had only flashes of memory of scenes from this film, enough that it was seared in and left scary thoughts for me growing up.
Terror Train (1980) - The story goes that I was three years old when I saw this film and it gave me nightmares and a general inability to go to sleep on my own. I was permitted to watch it because my sister, nine years older than me, was into horror films and my eight year old brother just didn't believe these movies. No one expected I would be so affected by it. I had no memory of it growing up and I never watched it until I decided to include it for this series.
Madman (1982) - I had a fleeting memory of the opening scene of this film which I knew involved someone telling a story round the campfire about a psycho killer living in the woods whose name, when uttered loudly enough, will summon him to kill again. Then some dick calls out, "Madman Marz! Come and get us Marz!" I thought I had another memory of the ending of the movie, but watching it for this series I discovered that I might never have seen the whole thing and that other memory must belong to some other movie.
Hell Night (1981) - One of my strongest early horror film memories came from this movie. The image of a kid with glasses getting his head twisted all the way around always stuck with me. Watching it for this series I found that the ending was familiar to me from a more recent memory so it's probable I once caught the ending on late night cable as a teen or pre-teen.
Hellraiser (1987) - All this time I thought I'd never seen this movie. The series and the Pinhead character were iconic when I was growing up. The fact that Hellraiser in general was just part of any decent conversation about horror films meant I had to include it. Then it turned out most of the movie was familiar. I'm sure now I must have watched it on late night cable as a teenager.
Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988) - My memory suggested that I had seen this film and watching it again confirmed that to some extent. Much of the movie was unfamiliar to me, but some parts were very familiar which seems to mean that I only ever saw bits and pieces while flipping channels. The truth is, the Hellraiser films just don't figure that heavily in my youth. But because they were something that most people my age knew about, talked about, and had seen, I decided to include the first two films in this October series.
Bad Dreams (1988) - I think my older sister had this on video and that's how I came to see it. My strong memories of it suggest that I saw it more than once, though. I found it scary enough as a kid.
Witchboard (1986) - This one I also wonder if my older sister had it on video. I really only remember seeing it once. I think it was already 1992 when she was living back home, so maybe that's why I remember it so well.
Candyman (1992) - This one was released when I was already fourteen and not really scared by scary movies anymore. I saw this on video with a bunch of friends in high school. I remember having feelings of not wanting to be in a bathroom with the light off because of the legend that if you say his name five times in front of the mirror, he'll appear behind you and kill you with his claw hand.
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) - A seminal horror film that I probably didn't see in its entirety until sometime after I'd seen the next two or three in the series. It was a little before more time, but I must have seen bits and pieces on TV growing up. Yes, Freddy scared me as a kid and I wasn't so much afraid to go to sleep as I was afraid that I might already be sleeping and he could appear at any time.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985) - Mostly I remembered this as being a kind of stupid sequel that didn't exactly fit in the series. I always had this innate sense that it was just a sub-par effort and it turns out I was always right. This one had much less effect on me as a kid than the next in the series.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987) - This was always the Nightmare film I was most familiar with. It was probably on TV more often than the others when I was old enough to be watching TV on my own at night. So this one scared me the most.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988) - I don't even remember how or when I watched this as a kid. Most likely my older sister (still into horror movies) rented it and I watched it before she returned it. I remember liking it, but not really finding it scary.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989) - This was the first scary movie I saw in the movie theater. My older sister took me when I was eleven. This was not a very scary movie to me and never resonated as strongly as Nightmare 1 and Nightmare 3.
Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991) - This was released at a point when I was growing out of that childhood phase of being fascinated by the way horror films could make your spine tingle, scare the hell out of you, and make you peak around dark corners in your home and even check under your bed before going to sleep. The things I heard about it were so awful, I didn't have much interest in it, but at some point as an early teen or sometime in middle school I rented it. Watching it for this horror series nearly all of it was familiar and I knew what was going to happen.
Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994) - This is one of the few films in this October series that I watched for the first time. This was kind of a big deal when it was released when I was in high school, but I just didn't have much interest in horror movies anymore. The premise was sort of interesting, but I just never got around to it. No, it had no direct effect on me as a kid, but it was part of the conversation, so I thought it important to include it. Also, it's the only one of the Nightmare series I hadn't seen.
April Fool's Day (1986) - SPOILERS: I used to catch this on TV when I was young and I always kind of liked it. It scared me well enough, even after learning the ending which reveals there was never really anything to be scared of.
My Bloody Valentine (1981) - My sixth grade teacher insanely allowed us to watch this movie in class. I remember we watched it in an adjoining room separate from the rest of the class. No one was forced to watch it. We were in that room by choice. If memory serves, my classmate Tom Ciavarella brought the film in. Tom, if you're out there, can you confirm this? I don't remember the movie having much effect on me or being all that scary. Watching it again I understood why.
Student Bodies (1981) - This was a seminal and important film for my childhood where the horror genre is concerned. I always remembered most of the movie distinctly. Watching it again I pretty much knew exactly what was coming at every moment even though it had probably been twenty years or more since I'd seen it last. This was a movie that my older sister and brother used to watch on TV and laugh through. I found a lot of it quite funny and I'd like to think that wasn't just because I was laughing along with them. Oddly enough, I probably learned about the conventions of the genre mostly from this film and as a result found scary movies more ridiculous after.
Friday the 13th (1980) - I probably never saw the original movie until after I'd seen a few of the others for the simple fact that it was long before my time and it was not widely available on cable. Certain images from the film always stayed with me like Mrs. Voorhees in that awful sweater and her short blonde her and of course her decapitation at the end. I also always remembered that scare at the end when Alice is attacked on the lack by the boy Jason leaping out of the water. The series as a whole had a profound effect of fright on me throughout my childhood. Even as a teenager watching some of these films made me nervous to have to turn all the lights off and go to bed.
Friday the 13th Part II (1981) - This may have been the one that scare me most probably because Jason with that brown sack over his head with eye holes cut out is far creepier than the absurd hockey mask. Of course in the later films he's built like a tank and takes on the aura of something akin to the Terminator, making it a little hard to take seriously. But a crazy guy living in a shantytown shack in the woods with a shrine to his dead mother? And he wears a bag on his head? And he kills people? Man, that f---ed me up.
Friday the 13th Part III (1982) -  My greatest recollection of this film was the hokey use of 3D. I never saw it in that format because it was only available that way in cinemas, but you can spot the moments in the film that are meant to have shit popping out of the screen into your face.
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984) - I knew that Corey Feldman was in this one, but as I watched it for this October series I discovered I had never seen it. I was dumbfounded because I honestly believed I'd seen them all.
Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (1985) - This is one of two Friday the 13th films that I remembered best. It must have played on TV a lot at a crucial time when I was growing up. Despite how stupid this movie is, it scared a great deal as a child.
Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI (1986) - This is the other of two Friday the 13th films that I remembered best because it played on TV a lot at a crucial time when I was growing up. I had certain deaths from this movie in particular kind of etched into my brain.
Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988) - This particular chapter didn't figure quite as strongly in my childhood as the two on either side of it. I'm not sure why that is. I know I saw it, or most of it, piecemeal on TV. But my memories of this were scattered.
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) - This one I used to catch quite a lot on cable. It contains my all time favorite death in a horror movie so it holds a special place in my heart for that. It also takes place (a small portion of it, anyway) in the city I love. But did it scare me as a kid? Probably a little, but the setting of New York City made it much less scary.
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993) - I rented this in high school not because I thought it would be any good or even because I thought it might scare me, but just out of some kind of loyalty to the series. I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to see this thing through to the end. Wasn't scary in the least.
Jason X (2001) - Just like with the previous film in the series eight years earlier, I only watched this for a sense of completion. Technically I shouldn't have even included it in this October series as it's meant to be a personal journey through my childhood memories of horror films, but I also wanted to list out all the deaths in the Friday the 13th series. Also, it just seemed wrong to leave this out. My friend and I rented this ten years ago and had good fun with it.
Freddy vs. Jason (2003) - Like with Jason X, this one shouldn't even be included in this October series but for a sense of completion with both Nightmare and Friday. How could I not include it? I have it noted that I saw this in the theater, but I have no memory of that whatsoever. It was released in theaters a week before I left on a three month backpacking trip. I find it hard to believe it was still in theaters when I returned. And I doubt I would have rushed out to see it while I was preparing for such a big trip.
Poltergeist (1982) - I remember watching this quite young because it was a popular movie when I was a kid and my whole family watched it, I think. Of course, I identified with the boy in the film and I even had a tree outside my bedroom window.
Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986) - This film might have scared me even more than the first one. That guy playing Revered Kane is just eerie and scary as hell. Every scene with him stuck with me for a long time, and still does really.
Poltergeist III (1988) - I decided not to include this film in the October series because I don't really remember watching it all that much. It never left an impression which probably means it's neither scary nor very good. I didn't feel like wasting my time.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) - I'm not entirely sure this film belongs in this October series because it's not a film that was part of my childhood memories of scary movies. I don't think I saw this until I was in college. But the film was always something I was aware of. Everyone knew about Leatherface and how this was supposed to be one of the scariest movies. It actually scare me quite a lot when I did finally see it.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986) - I'm sure I'd seen bits and pieces of this movie while I was young, but I had virtually no memory of it and it never really figured very heavily in my upbringing.
Halloween (1978) - For me this was always one of the scariest horror movies of my childhood and youth. I'm not even sure I saw this in its entirety before my teenage years or even before college, but I'm sure I caught pieces of it here and there.
Halloween II (1981) - I had very little memory of this first sequel. Some of it looked familiar as I watched it for this series, but mostly I don't think I ever really saw it.
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) - I have never seen this movie and I have no intentions to. It is Halloween in title only, having nothing at all to do with Michael Myers or anything related to the rest of the movies. The idea was to create a compendium of different Halloween-themed scary stories each year. It severely underperformed at the box office and they went back to Michael Myers several years later. I have chosen not to include it because it was not a part of my childhood at all.
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) - I was always much less familiar with the Halloween sequels growing up probably for a combination of two reasons: they weren't as popular and so didn't play on TV as often and they scared me a lot more so I avoided them.
Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989) - My familiarity with the Halloween series was always less than Friday the 13th and Nightmare because I found these films much scarier. I was even less familiar with this particular sequel and found watching it again that I remembered little of it in detail.
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995) - Because this was released when I was already nearing the end of high school it wasn't really a part of my horror culture when I was a kid. I watched it once when I rented it with a friend, but honestly that was probably when we were in college, past my cutoff year of 1996 for this October series.
Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998) - I saw this in the cinema when it was released, but I haven't included it in this October series of horror films because it doesn't figure in my childhood. Nor did the Halloween  films in general. This particular film was also made after the genre started trending differently by casting known actors in major roles. So this one had the rising star Josh Hartnett.
Halloween: Resurrection (2002) - I never saw this film and it doesn't fit in with the theme of this October horror film series so I have not included it.
Child's Play (1990) - This one was minimally scary to me when I saw it. I tried watching it for this series, but found it not really fitting with the slasher movie theme I was trying to maintain before October started. So it wasn't worth sitting through the second half. Then I ended up expanding the series to include all kinds of horror movies. I could have included it in the end, but it went off Netflix streaming.
Gremlins (1984) - It didn't occur to me until late in the month that this was essentially a horror movie. It's a monster movie in which the monsters start out as cute little things that become ugly and demonic. Yes, it was a frightening movie to a child. I was probably 7 or maybe 8 years old when I first saw it. It didn't give me nightmares the same way slasher films did because men are much scarier than monsters, but this movie really is disturbing for small children.
Critters (1986) - An obvious Gremlins knockoff that was not nearly as memorable and never really scary. I think the movie was meant to be playful and even funny, but it was just so derivative and uninteresting. The sequels are not worth mentioning.
Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990) - I remember seeing this on in the theater and by age 12 I was certainly not scared by this kind of thing. This movie was more fun than scary what with the mixed breed gremlins it featured.
The Lost Boys (1987) - A youth vampire movie that long predates Twilight, I used to watch this one quite a lot and there were certainly moments that really scared me when I was a kid. I already reviewed this film for my 25 Years Ago series earlier this year.
The Shining (1980) - A significant scary movie for me. The little boy looked a little like me (similar haircut) and got around the Overlook hotel on a Big Wheel like the one I used to ride around my block. This was definitely one of the scariest movies from my childhood.
Pet Sematary (1989) - I could do a separate series on adaptations of Stephen King books, but this one was one of those movie I used to watch on cable that scared me enough to make me nervous around the dark house. I was most scared by the dead cyclist who appeared as a helpful ghost. This was odd considering he's benign and helpful.
Salem's Lot (1979) - A TV movie from the Stephen King book that I remember seeing a boy. This probably didn't have nearly as much effect on me as other movies. I mostly remember the scene of a boy trying to get his younger brother to open the window to let him in. I remember thinking how strange it must be to see your older brother floating outside the window and instinctively knowing it would be a bad idea to give him entrance.
It (1990) - This TV miniseries premiered at an impressionable age for me and probably started my interest in reading Stephen King novels. I was twelve (just about the same age as the characters) when this debuted. The Tim Curry clown was scary enough. The stupid spider monster at the end was a bit of a joke.
The Silence of the Lambs (1991) - I probably saw this movie sometime when I was in high school. I was fairly familiar with it and I found it pretty damn frightening. It's not quite a horror movie in the same vein as a slasher film, but I thought it worth including because it's a variation on horror and it was part of my childhood and youth.
Alien (1979) - When I was a young child there was two foot (or so) alien doll that resided in my bedroom closet. It even had a mechanical jaw that ejected from inside its mouth just like the creature in the film. This was probably one of the scariest things you could put in a small child's closet. I used to see bits and pieces of the film when I was quite small and it did exactly what it was supposed to - scare the hell out of me.
Aliens (1986) - I was much more familiar with this sequel as a kid because it used to play a lot on cable. I enjoyed it because it was a essentially a war film with a platoon of soldiers whose deaths I could count down until there was one left. The movie certainly scared me, but it was more of an action film to me (as it was meant to be).
Seven (1995) - Although I saw this when I was already 17, it scared the shit out of me. When I saw it for the first time in the cinema I literally fell out of my chair at the moment when the 'sloth' victim turns out not to be dead. This was one of the most terrifying cinematic experiences I've ever had.
Scream (1996) - This is the natural closing to my personal journey because it was released during winter break of my first year in college. So I was at the beginning stages of becoming a full-fledged adult and being finished with things like getting scared by horror movies. That said, this was a cinematic experience that genuinely frightened me. This was a slasher film to put a cap on a generation's worth of slasher films that relied heavily on certain conventions. I still think it's a fantastic horror movie, but its effect has certainly worn off and been done to death in the intervening years.