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.

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Makeup and Hairstyling

The Grand Budapest Hotel is the likely frontrunner for the Oscar for Best Makeup and Hairstyling.

Each day as we make our way to the Academy Awards ceremony Feb. 22, Last Cinema Standing will take an in-depth look at each of the categories, sorting out the highs, the lows, and everything in between. Check back right here for analysis, predictions, and gripes as we inch toward the Dolby Theater and that world-famous red carpet.

Best Makeup and Hairstyling

The nominees are:

Foxcatcher

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Guardians of the Galaxy

Just about every year, there is grumbling about this category, and the complaints usually go something like this: The Academy Awards are the prestige film awards the world over, they should honor the best the film world has to offer, and under no circumstances should a film like Norbit end up anywhere near the Oscar ceremony. This logic is flawed in so many ways, but it is a topic that comes up all the time.

Yes, films such as Norbit, The Lone Ranger, Click, and Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa can call themselves Academy Award nominated, and something like The Nutty Professor (1996) can even slap “Oscar winner” on the DVD cover if someone in the marketing department so chooses, all thanks to this category. You know what? That is awesome.

I mentioned before how the cinematographers’ branch is willing to look outside the box for nominees. Well, meet the poster child branch for that idea. Prestige does not get an automatic pass. It is about the quality of the work and nothing else, which is as it should be. Also, I like to think about it this way: For every The Nutty Professor, there is an Oscar for The Fly or An American Werewolf in London. Sounds just fine to me.

In any event, no such complaints should be heard this year as all three nominated films are critically well regarded successes of one kind or another. Unlike many years in which there is a lone nominee in the category, all of this year’s contenders popped up in at least one other category, suggesting widespread love for each of them. The Academy tends to like old-age makeup, and barring the kind of transformative creature effects of someone like Rick Baker, they tend to reward the film with the most prestige that also features the most makeup, which brings us to our frontrunner.

The Grand Budapest Hotel – Though clearly well liked by the Academy as a whole, this is a bit of a surprise nominee, given the more flashy contenders such as Maleficent and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part I that were left on the sidelines. Still, now that it is on the shortlist, it is in the driver’s seat for this award. It is the most nominated film of the bunch, it is a Best Picture nominee, and the work is impeccable.

This is Frances Hannon’s first nomination, but partner Mark Coulier is a previous winner in this category for helping turn Meryl Streep into Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. The old-age makeup on Tilda Swinton in this film is as transformative, if not more so. Swinton is unrecognizable as Madame D., the elderly woman having an affair with Ralph Fienne’s concierge M. Gustave. Her hair is huge, her skin is sagging and wrinkled, and yet we never once question the reality of the transformation.

In addition, Hannon and Coulier do much more subtle work throughout the film, particularly on Fiennes and Willem Dafoe’s Jopling, a hired thug with distinctively bad teeth. To me, as good as the work on Swinton is, it is the Fiennes makeup that impresses most. He is an aesthete to his core. There is neither a blemish on his skin nor a hair out of place on his head. The makeup goes a long way toward creating the character Fiennes so well embodies.

Guardians of the Galaxy – If the award were for most makeup, this would win in a walk. Alas, it is not, but the makeup concocted by Elizabeth Yianni-Georgiou and David White goes a long way toward grounding many of the film’s more fantastical beings in a believable reality. Main characters such as Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and Drax (Dave Bautista) can exist in this world as a green woman and a blue man covered in tattoos, respectively, because the universe they inhabit allows for it. Yianni-Georgiu and White’s work is partly to thank for that.

According to the film’s star, Chris Pratt, Bautista’s makeup took up to five hours daily to apply and another hour and a half to remove, a process that included applying and removing 18 prosthetic tattoo pieces. The effort shows up on screen as Drax appears as a fully formed character before he even speaks a word, just judging by the lifetime of tattoos he has acquired. For Gamora, the look of Saldana’s character is created almost entirely through makeup, a tremendous commitment by both the actor and the crew to a project that often as not is completed through CGI these days.

Foxcatcher – That nose. There is actually a ton of great, subtle makeup and hairstyling work in this film, but I promise the only thing anyone remembers is the prosthetic nose worn by Steve Carell as John du Pont. If I am being honest – and I have no reason to lie to you fine folks – I found the nose distracting. There is a great exchange in Ocean’s Thirteen in which Matt Damon, who is wearing a fake nose as part of a con, defends his choice as “not just a prop for prop’s sake.” Carell’s performance is too good to hide behind a fake nose. It is a prop for prop’s sake.

The shame is that the rest of the makeup and hairstyling in the film is incredible, from the cauliflower ears on wrestling brothers Mark (Channing Tatum) and David Schultz (Mark Ruffalo) to the ghostly pallor of du Pont’s skin. Makeup artists Bill Corso, a previous Oscar winner for Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, and Dennis Liddiard do an amazing job of bringing three very real people to the screen. It would be a disservice to their accomplishment to boil it down to a big nose, but to be fair, it is a damn big nose.

The final analysis

Ultimately, any one of these three films could win, and each would be deserving to one extent or another, but the overall support for Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel will probably be enough to carry the day here. Guardians of the Galaxy is a definite challenger just based on the sheer amount of effort that shows through on screen, and Foxcatcher is probably bringing up the rear, which is simply an indication of the high quality on display in the category this year.

Will win: The Grand Budapest Hotel

Should win: The Grand Budapest Hotel

Wish it had been here: Noah

31 Days of Horror: The Fly

Jeff Goldblum is the scientist Seth Brundle, the man who will become The Fly.

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 21: The Fly (1986)

With all due respect to Kurt Neumann’s 1958 original, which is an entertaining sci-fi B-movie romp with surprising depth, nothing tops David Cronenberg’s The Fly for sheer grotesquerie, moral uncertainty, and scientific blasphemy. It is on a short list of very dark, very adult films I saw at (probably) too young an age and which left a lasting impact. Its impact, however, was not to terrify me – though this is the stuff of nightmares – but its emotional resonance is such that I find myself thinking about it every so often even now.

There is a very specific subgenre of horror of which Cronenberg is the imperator. It is known as body horror. There are plenty of films in which human bodies are subjected to any number of tortures and torments, but body horror refers to something different. It is the fear of what our bodies are capable of and of how close we all lurk to the edge of losing control over ourselves. This can mean disease or parasitic infection, madness, paralysis, or all of the above.

Since the beginning of his career, Cronenberg has had a preoccupation with human fears of sexuality and decay, often mingling these ideas into singular expressions of manifestly gruesome abominations. His characters are often terrified of the primal urges growing within themselves such as hunger, sex, and violence. The desire to repress these urges usually leads to an explosion of sorts, a rampage of the very behaviors the characters are trying to deny.

“There was an old lady who swallowed a fly. Perhaps she’ll die.”

Jeff Goldblum, in arguably his career-best performance, plays scientist Seth Brundle. Brundle is the inventor of a teleportation technology that will revolutionize transportation; however, when an experimental test he performs on himself goes wrong, his DNA is combined with that of a common housefly. From there, Cronenberg shows us every gory detail as Brundle slowly becomes more insect than man. Chris Walas’ makeup effects earned him an Academy Award for transforming Goldblum into the unholy beast he winds up as.

At first, he takes his increased strength, stamina, and virility to be positive signs of the teleportation device. But after he realizes what has happened, he knows these “improvements” are just the base instincts of the insect inside him taking control. In a wonderful monologue delivered to his girlfriend, Veronica Quaife, a journalist played by Geena Davis, Brundle makes his deepest fears known and makes it clear his nightmare has become a reality.

“You have to leave and never come back here. Have you ever heard of insect politics? Neither have I. Insects don’t have politics. They’re very brutal. No compassion. No compromise. We can’t trust the insect. I’d like to become the first insect politician, but you see, I’m afraid … I’m saying I’m an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over, and the insect is awake. I’m saying I’ll hurt you if you stay.”

It is a tragic acknowledgement that the scientist he once was may as well have never existed. Taken literally, as in the film, it is a bloody affair comprised of equal parts pain and pathos. But taken as a metaphor, it is the expression of a fear we all have – that our darkest selves will take over and the intoxication of that freeing power will blind us to our better nature. In The Fly, Cronenberg creates a world in which that power can be embraced or fought, but it can never be held back.

Tomorrow, we all cringe together as a modern French masterpiece takes body horror to its logical extreme.