Welcome to the 31 Days of Horror Redux

On this day, 10 years ago, I started a project called the 31 Days of Horror. Thirty-one horror movies in 31 days. It was a way of sharing my love for the genre by sharing some of what I considered, at the time, the greatest films in that genre. Now, 10 years on feels like the right time to revisit the project – but with a twist. Instead of my recommendations, I am going to be listening to the world’s recommendations and watching new films, myself.

Each day this month – October being the spookiest month, I think we can all agree – I will be watching at least one horror film that is new to me. I do not have a schedule planned, but I have a vague idea of the movies I want and need to see. I will write about each film in this space, each day, and share my thoughts on the world of horror.

There are no rules for this project, but I will try my best to seek out a variety of subgenres, marginalized filmmakers, and new voices. This should be exciting, hopefully as much for you as for me. At the end of this month, the goal is to be a better rounded horror film fan than I am as of this writing. I want to learn, I want to grow, and I want to understand the furthest corners (thanks, Frank) of what this wonderful genre has to offer. I hope you will come along with me on the journey.

However, before forging ahead, I thought it would be fun to take a look back. I have been in love with horror for essentially the entirety of my movie-watching life. From the time a misguided babysitter showed me Jaws at the age of 3 and I briefly avoided swimming pools like the plague. Or when that same babysitter, in an even more ill-advised moment, showed me Child’s Play at the age of 4. I had nightmares. I didn’t go to that babysitter much more after that.

The point is: Horror lives with me, and I live with it. I am neither dogmatic nor precious about it. Show me something new. Show me a new take on an old formula. Show me an old formula done well. Show me the schlockiest, most undercooked story and give me a cheap thrill. I love it all. I cannot vouch for the quality of it all, but my love is real. 

So, with that in mind, I thought it would be fun to kick off the 10-year anniversary of the 31 Days of Horror with a list of my 10 favorite horror films of all time. I have never done this exercise, and frankly, I am as interested to see how it turns out as you are.

A couple rules: First, I won’t repeat the same director, otherwise I imagine we’d be looking at a list of almost entirely Wes Craven and Sam Raimi movies. Next, single films only, no franchises, as tempting as it might be to highlight whole groups of movies. Third, I reserve the right to change my mind and update this list in 10 years. Fourth, this is about favorites, not best. While I think most if not all of the films below are legitimately great, my only endorsement here is that I enjoy watching them.

Finally, and this is less a rule than an observation: My definition of horror may differ from yours, and that’s okay. It’s great, even. That is the beautiful thing about horror. What is horrific to you may not be so to me and vice versa. I promise to play fair – no Jesus Camp, one of the most horrifying movies I have ever seen. Let’s see how this goes.

First a few honorable mentions and one jury award: Ginger Snaps, proof that when the right metaphor meets the right theme, magic is made; Paranormal Activity, without question the movie that scared me most as an adult; [REC], when people ask me the scariest movie of all time, there are a lot of candidates, but this is on the list; Trick ‘r Treat, just a ton of fun – all treats from minute one until its wonderful conclusion; and Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, a horror comedy that delivers laughs and gore in equal measure.

Jury award: Jaws. I had to break this out into a separate section because Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster is simply one of my favorite films of all time, but it teeters on the edge of what I would call “horror.” It certainly scared the hell out of a lot of people and continues to do so, but it’s mostly a drama that veers into thriller territory. Its moments of horror are suitably horrific, but they’re a little too few and far between for me to feel good about including it here.

Okay, onto the list. I wrote about several of these films at length in the original 31 Days of Horror series, so I will link to the longer pieces about each where applicable. Without further ado, my 10 favorite horror films of all time:

10. Leprechaun, directed by Mark Jones

Here’s my promise: Next year, on St. Patrick’s Day, I will devote an entire piece to my love of the Leprechaun films. We’ll get into the history of Trimark Pictures, the Jennifer Aniston of it all, Warwick Davis, and limericks. For now, I’ll just say this was a key piece of my starter kit as a child. There’s even a child as one of the leads. It’s not too scary. It’s not too gory. But it’s a helluva lot of fun, and it represents the kind of low-budget creature feature they don’t make enough of these days. And, it’s holiday-themed, to boot.

9. Carrie, directed by Brian de Palma

Some things that come to mind when I think about the greatest Stephen King adaptation (all due respect to The Shining): the hand at the end, of course; it is, perhaps, the most honest coming-of-age film ever made; the terror of religious fervor; Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie delivering all-time performances; the number of times I watched this late at night on TNT, sometimes as part of the Joe Bob Briggs show, which was very important to me. A masterpiece.

8. Night of the Living Dead, directed by George Romero

In 2014, I called this the greatest horror film ever made. Ten years later, that opinion has not changed. There was great horror before Romero unleashed his film upon the world – Psycho, Frankenstein, Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, etc. – but this is the dividing line in modern horror filmmaking. This 1968 film sets the template for everything that would come after in terms of intensity, gore, and thematic depth. To this day, few films can match it in any of those categories, let alone all of them.

7. The Mist, directed by Frank Darabont

The feel-bad movie for all time (and the other Stephen King adaptation on my list). That ending. My god, that ending. For about 115 minutes, The Mist is some of the most intense and intensely allegorical filmmaking you are ever likely to see, then its final 10 minutes hit. Gut punch is too light a term. It’s more like one of this film’s monsters burrowed into you and exploded from the inside out. Not for nothing, but it also features one of the all-time great jump scares from my theater-going years, perhaps only matched by The Others. If you know, you know.

6. 28 Days Later, directed by Danny Boyle

Back then, I wrote a lot about this film as a pandemic parable – really, that’s just the text of the movie, rather than parable – and at the time, we were in the midst of the Ebola panic, which turned out to be a blip on the radar. Since then, we have all lived through COVID. Along with Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, this provides a pretty accurate road map of how the world would feel in the grip of a pandemic. Suddenly, the parable that was always text became reality. That only made the movie more terrifying.

5. Tales from the Hood, directed by Rusty Cundieff

This omnibus of horror tales is the film that taught me movies could have a political consciousness. Not just horror movies, but movies in general. I cannot count the number of times I saw this Spike Lee-produced movie before I saw Do the Right Thing, so it was Cundieff who initially enlightened me on the abuses of police power, the scourge of domestic violence, and the false promise of “rehabilitation” in prisons. In many ways, this film is still a political guiding light for me.

4. Evil Dead II, directed by Sam Raimi

I could have gone with the original, The Evil Dead. I could have gone with the return to form, Drag Me to Hell. But if I am going to put one Raimi picture on my list of favorite horror films, it’s going to be this one every day of the week and twice on Sundays. This is the film where Raimi solidifies his status as a horror master. This is the film where Bruce Campell proves his bona fides as a leading man. This is the film where a man cuts off his own possessed hand and attaches a chainsaw to the stump. What else could you want?

3. From Dusk Till Dawn, directed by Robert Rodriguez

I waffled between this and the next film on the list a couple times. Two, three. Three, two. But I ultimately landed on this order because only the final 35-40 minutes of this film are actually horror. Everything before that is just an excellent crime picture. But, it’s that twist that makes this film so memorable. And, those last 35 minutes contain some of the gnarliest action-horror filmmaking you have ever seen. While the rest of you were watching E.R., this was my George Clooney of the ‘90s.

2. The Fly, directed by David Cronenberg

Speaking of, as a ‘90s kid, I should know Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park, and I should know Geena Davis from A League of Their Own. And, I do love those movies, although I actually prefer the Goldblum-led Lost World (a piece for another day). But, this is my Goldblum, this is my Davis, and The Fly is one of the most beautifully tragic romances ever put to screen. I knew that to be true, even as a child. That romance is ensconced in some of the most groundbreaking and influential body horror in film history, but it is a romance no less. 

The destruction of Seth Brundle’s body (pick your metaphor: cancer, AIDS, the ravages of age, what have you) is a brilliant effect, or rather a series of brilliant effects, but none of it means anything if we don’t care about the man at the center of it all and the woman who loves him. Cronenberg gets plenty of deserved credit for his work as a horror genius, but here, I must tip my cap to him as a master dramatist.

1. Scream, directed by Wes Craven

I’ve written about Scream a few times on this site, so I won’t rehash it here. I had seen horror movies before this, and heaven knows I’ve seen hundreds and hundreds since, but this is the one that changed everything. It spoke to me in a way movies had never spoken to me because it was about kids (played by obvious adults, but when you’re 8, teenagers and adults may as well be the same thing) who loved movies, just like I did. They knew everything about horror movies, just like I wanted to. One of the characters worked in a video store, which just seemed impossibly cool.

This film laid the groundwork for a decade of horror cinema that had more influence on my taste than probably any other era of any other genre. I Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legend, Final Destination, and the many sequels to all of them. I watched them all. I loved most of them. But, nothing holds a candle to the film that started it all. The direction is so smart. The writing is so smart. Within their world, even the characters are smart. All of which adds up to a film that treats the audience as smart, which is one of the rarest and most precious things in horror.

Year in Review: The Most Memorable Theater Experiences of 2023

This won’t mean anything to you unless you’re on a certain part of the film-specific social media world but: The movies are back, baby! Less abstractly, the domestic box office rebounded to more than $9 billion in 2023. In 2022, the number was $7.4 billion. We have not returned to the pre-pandemic days ($11.4 billion in 2019), but Americans have shown a willingness to go back to the theater. And, though sequels and franchises continued to run rampant at the box office, smart, original adult fare snuck in there, too.

This was, of course, the year of the Barbenheimer phenomenon. Greta Gerwig’s Barbie led the U.S. box office with $636 million in receipts, becoming the first non-sequel (or franchise continuation) to top the charts since Finding Nemo in 2003. Meanwhile, Oppenheimer, a three-hour historical drama about the man who created the atomic bomb, finished fifth at the box office with $326 million. That film was likely aided by the memification of the Barbie double bill and the Christopher Nolan imprimatur, but these kinds of things don’t happen much anymore, so wind-assisted or not, it’s worth celebrating.

Generally, I don’t spend a lot of time talking about the box office on this site because I really don’t care about how much money lines the pockets of the wealthy (mostly) men who seemed determined to destroy the industry they lead. See the introduction to this series for my thoughts on that topic. But, if we accept the cinema as a communal experience, then the larger the community, the grander the experience. The world is better when more people go to the movies together.

In that spirit, I wanted to share some of my favorite theater-going experiences of 2023. Last year in this space, I lamented the closure of The Landmark and the Laemmle Playhouse. This year, I celebrate the reopening of the Eagle Theater and Vista Theatre and the conversion of the AMC Sunset into the Landmark Sunset, all of which factor into the great cinema experiences discussed below. We still don’t have the ArcLight, and if it ever comes back, it seems like it won’t be until 2025, but at least we can say that the bleeding stopped, or at least slowed, in 2023.

We’ll start in my neighborhood, a scant 10-minute walk from my front door, at the Highland Park Theater, itself the subject of closure rumors. As of now, it survives. In early March, I attended a late-night showing of Scream VI. Ever since a bootleg VHS copy of the director’s cut of the original fell into my too-young hands (a story I recounted here), this has been my favorite film franchise. Over 25 odd years, I have seen each new film in theaters. I have aged with these films and these characters.

So, you can imagine my joy at my 10:35 p.m. screening when a young couple walked in, sat a row in front of me on the other side of the aisle, and set their infant child, in its carrier, on the ground. I mean joy sincerely. The couple was respectful of the theater, the child was well behaved, and a good time was had by all. I could not help but notice that the father had set the child down facing away from the film, then went to the snack bar. Moments later, the mother looked down and adjusted the carrier to face the screen.

Don’t worry. The child was surely too young to comprehend the violence on screen and more than likely slept through the whole thing. My joy comes in knowing that the next generation is out there. Scream 2 came out in 1997. I was 9 years old. My dad took me on opening night – my first opening-night screening. This child won’t remember being at Scream VI with its parents, but they were there.

As of this writing, the Scream franchise is in shambles. The producers undervalued their star, Neve Campbell, and she sat out the sixth installment. They thought they had the next generation in line and were ready to leave the past in the past. But, life comes at you pretty fast. With preparations for part VII underway, they lost one star to a successful Netflix series and the other to hysteria over political comments she made (let the record show, she did nothing wrong). Then, the director left. It’s hard to make a movie without stars or a director. Maybe, they will. Maybe, it will be good. But, maybe the luster is gone.

In May, I made my first visit to the Academy Museum theater. Why it took me so long, I don’t know. The film I chose, though, could not have been a better introduction, and the Museum could not have been a better showcase for the high camp of Prince’s Purple Rain. The Academy theater has the best sound system I have ever heard, and if you are in the Los Angeles area, you owe it to yourself to make the pilgrimage. A proud member of the museum, I know I’ll be going back for years to come.

Come July, the world was ready for Barbenheimer. It hit with a force not even the most optimistic projections could have imagined. Then, it didn’t stop hitting. Barbie became one of three movies to top the box office for at least four straight weeks in 2023, joining Avatar: The Way of Water and The Super Mario Bros. Movie. It stayed in the top 5 for 10 straight weeks before having its theater count sliced to make way for the openings of the new Paw Patrol movie, Saw X, and The Creator.

Barbie’s opening weekend accounts for the highest-grossing single weekend of a comedy in history. Its second weekend is second place on that list. As of the end of 2023, it stands as the 11th biggest movie in the history of the U.S. and the 14th biggest movie ever worldwide. It is, of course, the highest-grossing movie ever directed by a woman. Gerwig’s accomplishment truly boggles the mind. This is all made sweeter, of course, by the brilliance of the film itself, a whip-smart, uproariously funny, subversive parable that deserves every penny of its success.

Right there alongside it the whole way was Oppenheimer, a grand cinematic achievement of a different sort. Boxed out of the top spot by Barbie, Nolan’s film set the record for the highest-grossing film never to hit No. 1, breaking a mark previously held by such cultural phenomena as Beauty and the Beast and My Big Fat Greek Wedding. The film also had its own 10-week run inside the top 10. Whatever air Barbie had not sucked out of the room, Oppenheimer breathed for its own. There was nothing else this summer.

I caught a morning screening of Oppenheimer the Saturday it opened. The theater was mostly full, and the lobby was as pink as you might imagine. I held off until the Monday after opening weekend to see Barbie on the AMC Burbank’s magnificent Dolby screen. It felt like being part of a cultural movement, similar to when I attended the opening night midnight screenings of The Dark Knight and the original Avatar. Except, this was a Monday evening, yet the crowd was just as lively and invested. When I talk about shared experiences, this is what I mean.

The second time I saw Oppenheimer was about a month into its run, feeling the need to see it in Nolan’s beloved IMAX format. I attended the TCL Chinese IMAX in the heart of Hollywood, never an easy place to get to but all the more rewarding for it. I have my problems with the execution of the storytelling and characterizations in that film, but on that giant screen, it is an undeniable accomplishment. So big and bold and beguiling.

Two months later, I was back at the Chinese for AFI Fest, which I attended for the first time last year. Gerwig, the woman of the hour for her massive artistic and financial success, had been named the guest artistic director of the festival, offering her the opportunity to program a series of films she would introduce. I knew I must go to at least one of these screenings, and I chose the Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger masterpiece A Matter of Life and Death.

The film remains gorgeous, and Gerwig’s intelligent, impassioned introduction shone new light on an old classic. I won’t lie. She brought me to tears. Something about hearing a brilliant artist talk about something she cares about, it just gets me. Just like it got me the last time I saw this film, when Martin Scorsese screened it at the Lincoln Center in New York. It was impossible not to think of Scorsese discussing the film that night as I watched Gerwig deliver her own thoughts. Both are special artists, possessed of uniquely artistic souls. On this night of celebrating a classic, I knew the future, too, would be bright.

June 2023 brought the reopening of Vidiots, a long-beloved video rental store that had closed down a few years before. Lucky me, it reopened in my neighborhood. Of course, I have been a frequent customer. Ask me to see my membership card sometime. The new Vidiots space is attached to the old Eagle Theater, which had long fallen into disuse. 

The team at Vidiots did a beautiful job renovating the theater and the programming has been second to none. I finally had a chance to go in December for a screening of American Fiction, followed by a Q&A with writer-director Cord Jefferson and composer Laura Karpman. It was a full house, as most Vidiots screenings have been. I look forward to attending more. And, failing that, you can probably find me among the racks of DVDs most weekends.

Speaking of the return of classic LA theaters, the Vista Theatre, now owned by Quentin Tarantino, reopened its doors in November. One of the last films I saw at the cinema prior to the pandemic was a screening of Titanic at the Vista. All theaters closed shortly thereafter, and it took the Vista a little longer to return. But, it has, in all its glory, returned, as beautiful as ever. I saw Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest there, a fittingly haunting film for that grand old place.

Finally, I will close out with a film I saw at the above-mentioned Landmark Sunset, Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers. I will not dive too deeply on the film now since you will read more about it in future installments of this series. Andrew Scott, Claire Foy, and Jamie Bell, three of the film’s four stars, were in attendance for one of the most insightful, delicate, and wonderful Q&As I have ever been privileged to witness. 

Whether it was Scott talking about the emotional resonance of the story or Bell reflecting on his journey with his own family, the discussion was heartfelt and probing. It shared this in common with the film that preceded it, a screening I would wager drew more audience tears than any I have ever seen. I would never use tears to measure the quality of a film, but as a measure of the quality of the shared experience, they are perhaps second only to laughter.

I look forward to making 2024 another glorious year at the cinema and can only hope that the experiences I have over the next 12 months can live up to those of the past 12. As the world largely continues apace on its path of destruction and doom, within the four walls of the cinema, at least, I remain ever the optimist.

Check back next time for Part III of Last Cinema Standing’s Year in Review series as we take a look back at some of the best performances of the year.

R.I.P. Wes Craven

Writer-producer-director Wes Craven died Sunday at the age of 76.

It is late here on the East Coast, and I am in shock. It is about 11:15 p.m. as I write this, and I just learned of the death of Wes Craven. The horror master behind such great films as A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, and Scream was 76. According to a release from his family, he died of complications related to brain cancer.

It does little justice to Craven to list his credits, though the films he worked on are nearly all exemplary of his particular genius. He was more than his films. He was the influence and impact his films had on a generation of filmmakers such as Sam Raimi, Frank Darabont, and Eli Roth, among many others. He was an absolute legend, and though his last film was 2011’s underrated Scream 4, his impact is felt still in a million places.

Craven on the set of Scream.

On a personal level, Craven’s work was formative for me. As a child who grew up watching way too many horror movies for my age, I loved Craven’s films above all others. I have vivid memories of being 9 years old and sitting in the den of a friend’s house, watching a taped copy of the Scream director’s cut. It was recorded off HBO onto a VHS I only replaced with a DVD last year. I was the Ghostface Killer for Halloween three years in a row. The first time I saw a movie on opening night was the release of Scream 3, and I took a first date to see Scream 4.

None of that, however, compares to my relationship to A Nightmare on Elm Street. To this day, I will argue Freddy Krueger is the perfect horror villain, a creation entirely of Craven’s own making. If one can have scars in a good way, the Nightmare films left them on me. My grandparents were convinced enough of my maturity when I was a child to let me rent the Nightmare on Elm Street films and watch them in the living room during the summer days at their house while my dad was at work.

Wes Craven's New Nightmare

I remember my grandmother taking me to the library, and I checked out a Freddy Krueger novella and a behind-the-scenes, making-of Nightmare on Elm Street book. I was convinced I could copy the formula for fake movie blood and tried, though I do not know now, nor was I probably certain then, just what I planned on using it for. All I knew was the Nightmare on Elm Street people used it, so I wanted to use it. I still cite that book as one of the reasons I have always wanted to be a filmmaker.

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, well, there are your good scars. I was maybe 9 or 10. I was up late in an unfamiliar home and could not sleep, so I stayed up, pulled a VHS copy of New Nightmare off the shelf, and watched it all night. One of the clearest movie-related memories of my childhood is the babysitter in New Nightmare being dragged across the ceiling of a hospital room. I was not afraid, just quietly in awe. That image has stayed with me, and I hope it stays with me forever – a good scar.

Maybe I am rambling now. It is hard to put your thoughts together in times like these. The movie world is a worse place without Wes Craven in it, but we are all better for having had him in our world. I feel sorrow for his family, his friends, and anyone who knew him. And I feel shock. Be well friends.

31 Days of Horror: Scream

You can run, and you can hide, but if you break the rules, you probably will not escape in Scream.

In addition to our regular programming, every day this month, Last Cinema Standing will be bringing readers recommendations from the best of the horror genre as we make our way to Halloween. This should not be treated as a “best of” list but more as a primer. You can read the full introduction to Last Cinema Standing’s 31 Days of Horror here, and be sure to check back each day for a new suggestion.

Day 16: Scream (1996) 

As I said in the introduction to this month of the macabre (linked above), the best way to watch most of these movies is on VHS. The now-outdated technology has a delightful graininess to it that cannot be replicated on DVD. Something about a roll of tape moving reel to reel gives it a physical essence, and though I have not had to “be kind and rewind” in years, I think we lose an element of our past every time we leap forward in technology.

Maybe that is a discussion for another day, but I bring it up here for two reasons. First, Scream is absolutely obsessed with the past, which we will get into in a minute. Second, my introduction to this movie was on VHS, and that will always be an integral part of my memory.

Back in the bad old days of home cable, HBO was a bit of a rarity. Not everyone had it, and you could not just share your HBOGO password with your friends. On Demand did not exist as we now know it. You could call and order Pay-Per View, or you waited for what you wanted to see to come around in the rotation. DVR was not around, so you went to the store and bought a blank tape. Our friend, Tom, used to record tons of movies this way.

The director’s cut of Scream – with added gore and, therefore, added value – was the second half of one such tape. The first half was the Clint Eastwood movie Absolute Power. Because rewinding a tape is an inexact science, I have seen the ending of Absolute Power a number of times, but I have seen Scream dozens of times. I watched it over and over and can still recite much of it. I was the Ghost Face killer for Halloween three years in a row. All of this is to say: I like Scream.

Writer Kevin Williamson (creator of Dawson’s Creek) penned the right script at the right time, and old horror master Wes Craven was the right director for the material. This is a Generation X horror movie through and through – ironic, self-referential, too cool to care, and obsessed with a preference for the past over the present. It should be terribly annoying. Instead, it is riveting and entertaining in equal measure.

It asks more of its audience than any of the similarly minded late ’90s horror-thrillers that followed (the Williamson-penned I Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legends, Final Destination, etc.). Scream is enjoyable as a masked-madman movie, but if you are on its wavelength, the rewards are endless. From the moment the killer asks the now-immortal question, “What’s your favorite scary movie?” we are aware that we are in for a horror fan’s horror film. After all, how often do we get to watch characters who watch movies?

Even as they mock the characters of horror movies past, they gleefully engage in many of the behaviors they chastise. The characters go so far as to list the rules they need to follow in order to survive, then openly flout those rules, only to be swiftly and brutally punished. It is a belief system that reflects the MTV generation this movie targets (Scream actually won Best Film at the MTV Movie Awards): We now the rules. Damn the rules. If there are consequences, well, fair enough.

The who’s who ensemble of actors, led by Neve Campbell but which includes Courteney Cox, David Arquette, Jamie Kennedy, Skeet Ulrich, Rose McGowan, Matthew Lillard, and Drew Barrymore, is a perfect assemblage of talent for this story, and all walk the thin line of playing self-aware material straight. It is a glorious high-wire act under the sure, guiding of Craven, and it never falters.

Tomorrow, the most recent entry we will discuss plays around with horror tropes in the interests of laughs and gore.