Best Reels: Bloody Cuts | 5 Viewing Recommendations for Halloween Night
Dog Soldiers (2002) directed by Neil Marshall
The name Neil Marshall might first bring to mind the all-female spelunk-and-spook flick The Descent (2005), but the English director also made a significant splash with his feature debut, Dog Soldiers. Swap out the subterranean humanoid ghouls for 8-foot tall werewolves, the group of adventure-seeking women for an all-male group of British soldiers on a training mission, and the bowels of a cave system in the Appalachian Mountains for a dreary Scottish wilderness, and you’re still in for a teeth-clenching, white-knuckle survival ride that never lets up. The action is as relentless as you would expect it to be between brusque soldiers with everything to prove and vicious wolf-men with nothing to lose, and the creature design and gore effects are equally as visceral. Marshall demonstrates a mastery of frenetic yet comprehensible set pieces and the character moments that can be revealed within, bringing subtle, personality-revealing gestures and reactions to the fore amidst the carnage.
Blood Rage (1987) directed by John Grissmer
The constantly self-reflexive slasher film often has something to say or subvert with regards to its genre’s rules and motifs, but many released in the genre’s hey-day during the 80’s were reflexive only in the sense that they recognized the rules of the genre and the potential for demented fun that these rules afforded them. Enter John Grissmer’s Blood Rage. Alternatively (and tellingly) titled Slasher, this 1987 horror romp tells the story of identical twins Todd and Terry who get mixed up when young Terry murders a teenager at a drive-in theatre and then pins the crime on his brother. The meek Todd is sent to an asylum as a result, then released ten years later on Thanksgiving, prompting the real psychopath in the family, Terry, to go on a murderous rampage and try to pin everything on his brother once again. The whole thing takes place around apartment complexes where young adults are sneaking away from their family dinners to engage in various amorous activities. Equal parts beer and sex and blood, Blood Rage gleefully revels in the tried-and-true slasher formula, never aiming to reinvent the wheel. Instead, Grissmer focuses on inventing absurdly merciless kills and an infectious silliness. The film eschews exposition and often logic in the process, but who cares! Stop thinking so much!
The Eyes of My Mother (2016) directed by Nicolas Pesce
As pitch black as pitch black gets, The Eyes of My Mother was a surprise discovery for me at the 2016 Vancouver International Film Festival. A surprise because, at the time, I hadn’t been so thoroughly disturbed by a horror film in quite awhile; few films have managed to disturb me like this since. Beyond these revelations, there really isn’t much that jumps out and surprises you in this story. To watch this film is to know what is happening and to know what is to come, but it is this exact knowing—that dread instilled by what looms and what reveals itself to you as inevitable—that gets under your skin and eats away at you. Add to this some oppressive (but gorgeous) black and white cinematography and a blood-curdling score, and this film becomes 76 minutes of pure nightmare fuel. I’ll skip the plot synopsis, as it is best to go in completely blind here. But you’ve been warned!
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) directed by Tommy Lee Wallace
A notorious oddity in the Halloween franchise birthed from John Carpenter, mostly because it has nothing to do with Michael Meyers or the Halloween plotlines that preceded or followed, but also because it is such a gutsy, weird-for-the-sake-of-weird project. (Apparently, producers wanted to make the Halloween franchise an anthology series at one time.) When it comes to plot, imagine what a high school media arts class would come up with when tasked with thinking of a story set on Halloween night: “uh... what if monster masks could control children’s minds?” (That’s an over-simplification of the plot, granted, but I can’t give too much away.) Then, throw in elements of science fiction and Pagan/old-world folk horror as well. Also, a meta-commentary on the evils of the corporate-driven holiday that induces frenzied spending – think a spooky precursor to the anti-consumerist pop satire of Josie and the Pussycats (2001). It all sounds like it couldn’t possibly work together, but this film commits in earnest, while also acknowledging its silliness. Give it a chance. Even if you remember watching it as a kid, give it another chance. It’s an essential viewing experience for October 31st.
Raw (2016) directed by Julia Ducournan
Films using a woman’s body and a woman’s transformations within her body as conduits for horror themes has been long-practiced and written about. (See: John Fawcett’s Ginger Snaps (2000), which I am giving an honorable mention and not writing about in full, only so as not to double-down on werewolf films for this list). Raw puts its twist on the female experience of self-actualizing by examining the hungers of the flesh that accompany protagonist Justine’s sexual awakening and going so far as to ask, what if this young woman actually began hungering for human flesh? The result is a modern, macabre, and suitably stomach-churning allegory set against a particularly intense veterinary school with a penchant for hard partying and hazing rituals. This horror film is another director debut, but it can easily rank alongside the more well-known classics. A tight script and an intense performance from lead Garance Marillier wrap this whole film up for a spooky evening’s consumption (sorry).