Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983)

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It’s been over eight years since I first saw Something Wicked This Way Comes, the 1983 Disney Pictures adaptation of the Ray Bradbury novel, when we covered it for “Movie of the Month” in July of 2017. In looking back over what I wrote, it seems that at the time I was most interested in communicating how the film differed from the novel and allowing my cohort to get more into the meat of what the film meant to them. In that discussion, there’s mention of the fact that this film works best on VHS, but I recently got to see the digital, full screen version that was just added to streaming at the beginning of this month, and it was virtually a brand-new experience for me. I’m not sure if it was because the tape I had was substandard or I was suffering with some kind of mind-numbing flu at the time of my initial viewing, but this felt like a brand new movie to me, as if I had never seen it before, and I felt the need to revisit it in writing as well. 

I’ve been toying around with creating a bit of an “80s kid horror syllabus” lately, which has involved a first-time watch or a rewatch of some of the mini-genre’s greatest hits: The Watcher in the Woods, Labyrinth, Return to Oz, Paperhouse, The Dark Crystal, and, regrettably, Transylvania 6-5000. I remember being somewhat less than impressed with Something Wicked upon first viewing, but this time around, I found myself utterly captivated by it. The film is told from the point of view of an adult Will Halloway, about the final days leading up to his fourteenth birthday on Halloween, sometime in the 1950s. The young Will (Vidal Peterson) tells us early on that this is really the story of his father, Charles (Jason Robards), and the way that his father saved Will and his best friend Jim Nightshade (Shawn Carson) from a dark and mysterious force that appeared in their small midwestern town of Green Town. This evil is mostly represented in the forms of carnival proprietor Mr. Dark (a delightfully malevolent Jonathan Pryce), his brutal right hand man Mr. Cooger (Bruce M. Fisher), and the enigmatic “dust witch” (Pam Grier) who charms men to their doom. 

I mentioned it way back when, but Something Wicked (the novel) undoubtedly had an effect on Stephen King’s Needful Things, so much so that the latter work bears as much similarity to this film as, say, Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass does to King’s own work. What I was struck by on this watch was how much it must have also influenced IT, given that the narratives both revolve around young children on the cusp of adolescence who resist the machinations of an intangible force of evil to which adults are blind (or blinded). The difference is that in IT, Pennywise seeks to consume the fear of children because their fears are much more concrete than those of adults and thus are something it can manifest while its supernatural powers make it nearly imperceptible to adults while, in Something Wicked, Mr. Dark’s mystical offers to the adults of Green Town are specifically aimed at the regrets that age has wrought on them. It’s telling that his offers are mostly lost on Will, a boy with two loving parents (even if his father is in poor health) and who has experienced only one traumatic event, while Jim, a boy living with a single mother because his father disappeared years ago and who can’t wait to grow up, is much more susceptible to Dark’s machinations. Jim and Will represent the two sides of fantasy; while Will still has the childlike imagination that inspires play, Jim’s daydreaming is maladaptive and, thus, makes him more vulnerable to being taken advantage of by Dark (and darkness). 

In that above-linked “Movie of the Month” discussion, there was a general consensus that Mr. Dark and his legion were preying upon people’s selfishness, but I see something different in it now. For some, their temptation may be related to something that we could call weakness—Miss Foley, once the town’s greatest beauty and now an old spinster, desires her youthful grace vainly; Mr. Tetley the cigar-peddler has piddled away his money on lottery tickets greedily; Mr. Crosetti the barber desires the company of a woman as apparently the only single man in a town of married women lasciviously (although I think the last of these is arguable). But I think maybe we were all operating under our own youthful blindness back then, because we failed to identify that what Dark was offering wasn’t the opportunity to indulge in a variety of selfish, carnal desires but to overturn the regrets of the past. This is made most manifest in two characters: Mr. Halloway (naturally, as the main character), but more blatantly in the form of the town’s bartender, Ed, played by real life amputee James Stacy. Ed is a strange figure, as he still wears his old football jersey around the town and can’t stop talking about the good old days, and if he were still an able-bodied man, we would pity him for being the kind of guy who peaked in high school and never shuts up about it. As it is, since he has lost an arm and a leg, we are sympathetic both to his fond remembrances of the past as well as the ease with which he is seduced by Dark’s promise of making him “whole” again. This reveals that there’s more than mere selfishness (or vanity, greed, or lust) at the heart of Dark’s bargains, but the false promise of a life without regret, and sets up the offer that he makes to Mr. Halloway. 

This is a wonderfully clever bit of narrative misdirection. Mr. Halloway’s greatest regret isn’t that he’s not wealthier or younger, but that his being a relatively older father and thus not being strong enough to save Will when he was swept up in a current at a riverside picnic means that he failed his son. Halloway’s regret lives outside of him; it’s in the way that his son panics and tries to run from the adult conversation about what happened that day at the river. Dark can only perceive that Halloway desires to be young and strong again, and his offer to return his youth to him fails not just because Halloway isn’t calloused and heartless enough to give up his child for a few more decades but because Dark can’t see that Halloway’s heartache exists in relation to another person. Turning the clock back for the elder Halloway won’t magically erase his failure to save Will from drowning (allowing the drunken and long-disappeared Mr. Nightshade the opportunity to be the unsung hero), and won’t mystically restore what fractured between father and son that day on the riverbank. The irony is that what Dark offers and what defeats him is the same: regression. He can only offer Halloway the chance for mystical rejuvenation by regressing him to an earlier age, but it’s Halloway’s regression to the state of childlike optimism that starves the carnival, since it feeds on negative emotions, allowing a chance for Dark to hoist his own petard aboard the aging/de-aging carousel. 

This film is also a visual marvel. Now that it is widely available again, it’s entering The Discourse, and I’ve seen several neutral(ish) criticisms that the film is wonderful “despite” that the “visuals don’t hold up.” I would disagree wholeheartedly, as I don’t think that the representations that we see on screen were ever meant to fully evoke “reality.” As the malevolent train rolls into town, eerie wisps of smoke are drawn over the frames, and this same smoke attempts to capture the two boys later in the film, but it was never really meant to be smoke, it was “smoke” in a more ephemeral sense. Several vistas are clearly matte paintings with the occasional distant, twinkling light in them, but it’s only “unconvincing” if you expect the film to perfectly reproduce a landscape, and I feel that the film informs us that we shouldn’t be expecting that from the first moments, when the adult Will tells us via narration “This is really the story of my father and that strange, leaf-whispery autumn when his heart was suddenly too old and tired and too full of yearning and regrets, and he didn’t know what to do about it.” This is the old home town through the eyes of a child, and what most modern viewers mistake as the “fakeness” of the images used to convey this narrative is an externalization of the mysteriousness of the world to a boy on the cusp of young adulthood, inevitably putting him on the path to being a man whose regrets will crystallize into something manipulable. It’s expressionistic, like Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, or Metropolis, or the non-narrative “fictional” interludes in Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. To hold Something Wicked to a standard of photorealism is to miss the point utterly, and the film’s visual beauty lies in the way that it plays with this self-mythologizing of one’s own childhood, the way that the real becomes the surreal in mind and memory. 

I can’t recommend a revisit (or a first-time watch) of this one more highly, especially in these twilight hours of the spooky season (or, depending on when this goes live, in the dawning days that follow it). Even if you, like me, watched this one once upon a time and weren’t entranced by it, give it another shot. You won’t be disappointed.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Return to Oz (1985)

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My first obsession as a child was with Oz. The MGM musical has been a part of my life for so long that I can’t recall the first time I saw it, as its entrance into my life predates my earliest still-retained memories. I can recall the first time I saw any other Oz-related media, however, as I can still remember—even if distantly and vaguely—a Christmas that we spent at my grandparents’ cold New Jersey apartment when I was four years old. They had HBO, and in the early hours of the morning, with the scent of Community Coffee (which we always brought to my grandparents when travelling, as well as several containers of Tony Chachere’s, both of these being luxuries they couldn’t obtain in the north) and my grandmother’s Marlboro Reds in the air, I watched an episode of an animated series featuring Dorothy and company. This was a revelation to me, that there was more Oz to know, and I immediately started to devour as much of it as was available. I was reading by age five and although the early 20th century diction of the Oz books was somewhat difficult to parse, most of the versions available at my library were illustrated, and this was enough for the early years. But what affected me even more than the Judy Garland film was its long distant Fairuza Balk-starring sequel, Return to Oz, which was exactly the kind of proto-horror that my young brain was attuned to. 

Return to Oz opens in Kansas, where the reality of post-tornado living is dreary and dire (and, given the age that I was when I first saw it, likely felt familiar to me in the wake of Hurricane Andrew). It’s nearly winter and the new house isn’t complete, and while Dorothy excuses Uncle Henry’s tendency to stare into space with his feet up, Aunt Em knows that it’s PTSD, even if the terminology doesn’t exist yet. Still, she’s more concerned with young Dorothy’s mental state, given that the little girl no longer sleeps through the night (when she sleeps at all) and is insistent that her imaginary journey to fairyland and the friends she made there are real. Em’s desperation to do the right thing for her niece leads her to leave the girl in the care of a doctor named Worley (Nicol Williamson) and his severe-faced nurse Wilson (Jean Marsh) overnight, where they promise that the newly discovered “science” of electroshock therapy will cure all of Dorothy’s ills. A storm comes in the night that allows Dorothy an opportunity to escape, which she does, although she ends up falling into a river; climbing aboard some floating debris, she falls asleep, only to discover that she has awakened near Oz, and is in the company of Billina, one of her chickens, who has not laid an egg since the tornado. 

Dorothy quickly discovers an Oz in ruins. Although she finds the old house she first arrived to Oz in, there’s no Munchkin village nearby; the yellow brick road she travelled for much of the first film is in a state of advanced disrepair; the Emerald City’s brilliant gemstones have vanished as the city’s architecture lies in ruins. Worse, the city itself is ruled by the Wheelers, a pack of feral Klaus Kinski-looking men who travel on all fours on legs that end in squealing wheels. Hiding from them, she finds “the royal army of Oz,” which consists of a single individual, a mechanical man named Tik-Tok who is awakened via a series of wind-up keys. The inhabitants of the city have all been turned to stone by magic, with only Tik-Tok having survived this transformation unharmed by virtue of not quite truly being alive. He’s only the first of Oz’s inhabitants to join Dorothy’s new adventuring party, however, as she also soon collects Jack Pumpkinhead—a Jack o’ Lantern/scarecrow hybrid brought to life in order to scare the witch Mombi (Marsh again)—who governs the empty Emerald City as regent for the Nome King (Williamson again). The final member of the group is the “Gump,” a loathsome creature that Dorothy and company build out of old furniture and assorted attic garbage and bring to life via the same magic powder as Jack was in order to escape Mombi. Adventure awaits! 

Although it may not be the most valuable element of media made for children, I do think one of the things that makes a piece of kid-oriented art have some sense of staying power is the extent to which it encourages imaginary play. A kid who loves The Land Before Time will get just as much pleasure out of going to the playground and pretending to be Littlefoot with their friends as they would out of rewatching the movie. I vividly remember running around in my front yard with my mom as a kid, sometimes on all fours, shouting “To the meadow! To the meadow!” in recreation of a scene from Bambi; the Little Golden Book Scuffy the Tugboat encouraged me to get outside in the rain and play with my own toy boat, and my mother still uses “There’s enough to float Scuffy” as a descriptor of how much rainfall she gets when I call her. Even more so than The Wizard of Oz, The Return to Oz capitalizes on this inherent hunger that children have to create the magical out of the mundane, and it does so using the same extratextual decision that Wizard did—that Oz contains “echoes” of the real world—in a more deliberate way. In the earlier film, this was much more explicitly a way of telling the audience that Dorothy’s adventures were just a dream all along, that her companions were the farmhands and the witch was Mrs. Gulch, translated into her fantastical dreams. As an official sequel, Return follows that same narrative choice, but more subtly and arguably more fantastically. Besides the obvious correlation between Worley/the Nome King and Wilson/Mombi, we also see Dorothy’s “inspiration” for Tik-Tok in the form of the shock therapy device, and she’s given a tiny jack o’ lantern by another patient (who is the spitting image of the missing Ozma, princess of Oz, who also happened to be Jack Pumpkinhead’s “mother”). 

This is something that all children do, applying personality to toys and items and giving them voices and roles in their imaginary play. Even if kids don’t pick up on that being what’s happening in the film, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t unconsciously get absorbed and make their internal worlds just that much more magical. That’s not even counting the number of kids who realized that they could imagine returning to a fantasy land in disarray as a new adventure to play out, following the yellow brick road once more, but one that’s twisted and broken. What if I pretended I was in NeverNeverLand, but without Peter? What if Fantasia needed another Bastian to give the Empress a new name? What if Narnia fell? (Admittedly, Prince Caspian opens in the ruins of the Pevensie’s castle Cair Paravel and The Last Battle features the actual end of Narnia, but you get what I’m saying.) 

I’ve spent enough time praising the film for its potential to inspire imagination, which, while valid, isn’t praise for the film as a text unto itself. Every time I watch Return, I discover (or rediscover) something new to love about it. For one thing, this is a film that I never really thought of as being funny when I was a kid, but there are one-liners and jokes aplenty that will no doubt appeal to any adults in the audience (one of my favorite smirkers is Dorothy’s reply to Jack’s confusion that Tik-Tok might still be able to talk after his “thinking” spring had run out, which is to say that “It happens to people all the time”). My favorite thing about the film is the presence of the copper kettle-like Tik-Tok, who was always my favorite character in the books as well, with the eighth book in the series, Tik-Tok of Oz (specifically the one with this less-than-honest cover) being read no less than fifty times in my childhood. He’s just adorable. I love him. Billina is perhaps the second best non-human actor in the film, a Henson Company creation that’s such a perfect recreation of a Buff Cochin Bantam hen that there are moments where I know she’s a puppet and others where I know she’s a real chicken, but there are many more where I could not tell you if she’s “real” or not to save my life. 

If the general public remembers this one at all, it’s usually negatively in comparison to their memory of the MGM picture, or they remember this one specifically for being on the scary side. While Wizard’s Wicked Witch of the West scared generations of children, this film had multiple frights that play out over the course of the film. The escape from the sanatorium is notably frightening, as the nurse screams into the pouring thunderstorm for Dorothy and her benefactor to return before they fall into a river and nearly drown. The Wheelers are scary, with their squealing wheels (inspired by the squeaking gurneys in the Kansas portion, naturally), and several of them are turned to sand and desiccate before blowing away when they fall into the Deadly Desert while pursuing Dorothy and friends. The Nome King’s death as he becomes more rocklike before crumbling and melting away in a hellish fire, his stone skeleton frozen into a screaming death face before it eventually crumbles, is also noteworthy, as is much to do with the Nomes and their kingdom in the first place (their faces moving about in stop motion on various rock faces remains impressive to this day). But the most memorable scene is one that I would argue remains one of the most chilling in all of cinema, including horror made for adults. At one point in the film, Dorothy must sneak into the chambers of Princess Mombi, which she has already seen contains dozens of glass-fronted cabinets containing the detached (but still living) heads of various Ozian women, which she changes to suit her mood as easily as changing hats. She awakens Mombi’s original head, which then begins chanting her name in a guttural, almost unearthly voice, as all the heads around her scream and Mombi’s headless body rises from her bed to attack. It’s fantastic!

It’s only a matter of time before this film gets lumped in with its intro-to-horror brethren as fodder for slop content along the lines of “CaN yOu BeLiEvE they showed THIS MOVIe to KiDs!!?!” that I’ve started to see pop up online. (Newsflash: if you’re under a certain age, you may not realize this, but art used to be created for multiple groups to enjoy and get something different out of because we didn’t all have individual devices programmed to shovel unchallenging, hyper attuned, algorithmically-driven, intellectually incurious fodder into our brains every waking hour). Enjoy it now before the internet tries to ruin it for you.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Kill-O-Rama 2025

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Without question, the local MVP this Halloween season has been the original uptown location of The Prytania, which has provided the bulk of local repertory horror programming in the lead-up to today’s spooky holiday. Not only was the single-screen theater’s regular Classic Movie Sunday slot repurposed to feature Halloween fare this month (Dial M for Murder, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, The Haunting, 13 Ghosts, The Bride of Frankenstein, and Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein — all Swampflix favorites), but The Prytania also doubled down on its Spooky Season Content by staging a week-long film festival of classic horror titles. In collaboration with local MVP horror fest The Overlook, The Prytania launched a “Kill-O-Rama” lineup midway through the month, making up for the relatively anemic output of exciting new horror releases currently making the rounds. This year’s Kill-O-Rama lineup included perennial Spooky Season classics The Exorcist & Halloween, a 30th anniversary screening of George Romero’s Day of the Dead, multiple alternate-ending variants of the murder-mystery crowdpleaser Clue, and a victory-lap rerun of their 70mm print of Sinners (which they’ve been heroically exhibiting all year). It was the exact kind of Halloween-season programming I’m on the hunt for every October, conveniently gathered in one neighborhood theater. Although I was unable to give this year’s Kill-O-Rama the full mind-melting marathon treatment I tend to give other festivals, I was able to catch a few screenings from the program, reviewed below. Here’s hoping that this festival format returns to The Prytania next Halloween season, when I can plan ahead to live in the theater for a week solid — ignoring all non-scary-movie obligations in my schedule until All Hallows’ Eve has passed.

Interview with the Vampire (1994)

Sometimes, procrastination pays off. It’s likely shameful that I hadn’t seen the 1994 adaptation of Anne Rice’s vampire saga Interview with the Vampire until this year, especially since I lived here through the 90s era when the French Quarter was overrun with gothy vampire cosplay inspired by Rice’s local cachet. It was especially fun to watch with a New Orleans audience, though, so I’m glad I didn’t spoil the experience by diluting it with ad breaks on cable. There’s a moment late in the runtime when Brad Pitt’s woe-is-me vampire Louis announces that he is traveling to reunite with his jilted master (Tom Cruise, as the dastardly Lestat) on Prytania Street, and the crowd erupted into titters. It’s the most firmly I’ve felt rooted in The Prytania’s geographical location since catching an early screening of Happy Death Day there (which was filmed on a college campus a few blocks away, with students filling out most of the audience). Interview with the Vampire is not entirely anchored to New Orleans, but instead globetrots between three international cities: New Orleans, Paris, and San Francisco — great company to be in. Still, its locality is undeniable in that New Orleans is the chosen home of its most infamous vampire, Lestat, who attempts to break away from the restrictions of his European coven to establish a new afterlife on American soil, starting his new family by turning the sad-eyed Louis into one of his own. There’s only trouble once that family becomes nuclear, when Louis gives into vampiric temptation by feeding on a small child, damning her to an eternal adolescence as her new two dads’ doll-like daughter. After about thirty years of faux-domestic stasis, she rebels in spectacularly violent fashion, burning their shared home to the ground in a righteous rage.

For all of the A-lister hunks in the cast (Cruise, Pitt, Christian Slater, Antonio Banderas), I was most impressed with Interview with the Vampire as The First Great Kirsten Dunst Movie. Dunst has been a wonderfully talented screen actor for as long as I can remember watching the screen, but it’s still incredible to watch her out-perform her more famous, better-paid adult co-stars in a role filmed when she was only 10 years old. Dunst’s embodiment of Claudia, the eternally dollish vampire, conveys a world-weariness and vengeful fury far beyond the age of the actor behind it. Part of the reason she stands out so much is that all of the male leads are such sad sack yearners, all fitting neatly into the somber tone typical of director Neil Jordan’s work. Jordan’s interpretation of Rice’s text is more melancholy than it is sensual, finding its hunky, mutually obsessed vampire men jaded beyond repair long after they’ve lost their lust for sex & blood. As the latest addition to that damned clan, Claudia is the only character who’s going through a major emotional upheaval, so that the story’s most violent, extravagant turns rest on her little shoulders. Given the specificity of locale and the name-brand talent elsewhere in the cast, it’s likely the movie would remain undead in annual Halloween-season circulation with or without Dunst’s involvement, but it’s her performance that actually earns that cultural longevity. She’s eternally great.

Corpse Bride (2005)

I was drawn to Kill-O-Rama’s 20th-anniversary screenings of Tim Burton’s stop-motion musical Corpse Bride for a few reasons, not least of all because it felt like a rarer anomaly in the schedule than more frequent go-tos like The Exorcist & Bride of Frankenstein. That’s assumedly because it’s a lesser loved title among the rest of the heavy hitters on the schedule, despite it being a perfectly charming seasonal novelty. When it was first released, Corpse Bride was treated like the microwaved leftovers from earlier Tim Burton/Henry Selick productions like The Nightmare Before Christmas & James and the Giant Peach, but 20 years later it now plays like a precursor for later Laika productions like ParaNorman & Coraline, which have since become the go-to primers for lifelong horror nerd obsession among youngsters. Time has mostly been kind to it, give or take the biggest star in its voice cast (the wine-tasting spit bucket Johnny Depp), but I’ve personally always had a soft spot for it. It’s hard not to adore a movie that fantasy-casts Peter Lorre as a talking brain maggot with kissable lips and takes breaks from advancing its plot to animate a band of stop-motion skeletons playing saxobones against Mario Bava crosslighting. I missed the film during its initial theatrical run, though, so I had only ever seen it on a 2nd-hand DVD copy, which made this repertory screening a must-attend event.

In short, Corpse Bride looks great. All of the visual artistry that distinguishes The Nightmare Before Christmas as a holiday classic is echoed here without any lost integrity. The worst you could say about it is that Burton borrows a little too freely from former collaborator Henry Selick in the production design, to the point where the underworld afterlife setting appears to be pulled from the live-action sets of Selick’s Monkeybone, entirely separate from the film’s production overlap with Nightmare. If I were Selick, I might be complaining, but as an audience member, I’m more than happy to spend time with the cartoon gals & ghouls in that underground otherworld where every day is Halloween. Much like in earlier auteurist works like Batman Returns, Edward Scissorhands, and Ed Wood, Burton conveys a yearning desire to party with the undead freaks of the underworld instead of being stuck with the drab drips of the living flesh. Johnny Depp & Emily Watson voice a soon-to-be-married couple of awkward strangers who’ve had all the joy of life strangled out of them by their uptight, aristocratic parents. They seem to be instantly, genuinely fond of one another despite the grim-grey world they sulk in together, but tragedy strikes when the groom accidentally marries an animated corpse instead while practicing his vows in the spooky woods outside town. The titular undead bride (Helena Bonham Carter, duh) drags the poor, nervous lad down to her Halloweentown underworld where he’s forced to party with the lively dead instead of moping among the dead-eyed living. Song & dance and comedic antics ensue, ultimately resulting in a tender-hearted reunion for the rightful bride & groom and a cosmic comeuppance for the dastardly cad who sent the Corpse Bride underground in the first place. It’s wonderful kids-horror fare, especially if your particular kid has already re-run Coraline & ParaNorman so many times that you’ve become numb to their Laika-proper charms.

Frankenstein (2025)

The concluding event on the Kill-O-Rama schedule was a double feature presentation of James Whale’s iconic 1931 adaptation of Frankenstein and the latest interpretation of that text, directed by Guillermo del Toro. Besides the double-feature format of that programming, the most exciting aspect of the new Frankenstein film’s presentation during Kill-O-Rama is that The Prytania continued to run it weeks after the fest concluded on a 35mm print, the only venue in town to see the film on celluloid before it is shuffled off into the digital void of Netflix. After similar runs for titles like Sinners, Tenet, and One Battle After Another, The Prytania is making a reputation for themselves as the premiere film venue in town by default, since they’re the only place that can actually project film. Given the massive crowds that have been swarming The Prytania every night in the past week to catch Frankenstein in that format, it’s clear that the public yearns for tangible, physical cinema and are willing to pay extra for it. My screening even started with an audience member loudly booing the Netflix logo in the opening credits, to the rest of the crowd’s delight. Netflix’s omnipresence in urban & suburban homes indicates that most of these crowds could’ve waited a couple weeks to see Frankenstein at home for “free,” but they instead chose to attend a big-screen presentation with richer, deeper colors in projection and visible scratches on the print. It was a classic theatrical experience befitting such a classic literary adaptation.

As for the movie itself, it’s exactly what you’d expect from a Guillermo del Toro adaptation of the Mary Shelley source text. It’s pretty, it’s moody, and it’s got a surprisingly sensitive heart for a movie in which a mad scientist stitches together leftover corpse parts to create a monster and then proceeds to abuse that monster. The biggest surprises in Frankenstein lurk in the intensity of the performances, given that the actors could have easily gone through the motions and let the exquisite sets & costumes do all of the work. Mia Goth conveys a defiant ferocity as Dr. Frankenstein’s uninterested love interest, matching his creative intensity but swatting down his god-scale ego in what feels like an onscreen avatar for Mary Shelley’s literary jam sessions with Percy Shelley & Lord Byron. Jacob Elordi plays Dr. Frankenstein’s monstrous creation as a big scary baby who’s convincingly dangerous when provoked but angelic when properly nurtured. Oscar Isaac is feverishly manic as Dr. Frankenstein himself, so fixated on his mission to bring dead flesh back to life that he doesn’t consider what kind of father he’ll be once he succeeds (having only Charles Dance’s physically abusive patriarch as a default example to follow once the creature is in his care). It’s in that cautionary tale of what happens when you single-mindedly dedicate yourself to a passion project at the expense of your own humanity that del Toro’s Frankenstein starts to feel personal to the director beyond its surface aesthetics. This is a project he’s been fighting to complete for decades and, thus, it has partially mutated into a story about the madness of its director’s own grand-scale, solitary ambition. The result is not one of del Toro’s best works, but it’s at least a more heartfelt, refined, accomplished version of what Kenneth Branagh failed to fully give life when he adapted Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1994. After three or so decades of book-faithful Frankenstein adaptations, I’m excited that we’re approaching the point when Jack Pierce’s creature design will enter the public domain (in 2027) so that every new repetition of this story isn’t so fussy & literary, but del Toro’s version still feels like an exceptional specimen of its ilk. I appreciated seeing it big & loud with a full horror nerd crowd, instead of alone on my couch the way Netflix intended.

-Brandon Ledet

Death Metal Zombies (1995)

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One essential quality I’m always looking for in horror movies during Halloween season is an essence that can only be described as “Slumber Party Appeal.” If you’re reading this blog, I hope that you’ve aged well past the point of attending slumber parties at a friend’s house under loose parental supervision, but you should still know what I mean. A horror movie with good Slumber Party Appeal is one with disgusting gore gags, gratuitous nudity, and an overall jovial atmosphere that keeps the mood light while you chomp on mediocre pizza delivery with your half-asleep buddies. The 1995 SOV horror Death Metal Zombies was made in the peak slumber party movie-watching era: back when video stores democratized film distribution so that micro-budget shock fests shared the same shelf space as major-studio productions. It immediately signals its Slumber Party Appeal in its crosscutting between intros of various metalhead characters as they get ready for the weekend by clocking out at work, headbanging to bedroom stereos and, most importantly, taking a steamy shower. Every time the camera cuts back to the showering babe in this metalhead friend group, she seems to only be concerned with the cleanliness of her breasts at the expense of the rest of her body. She’s shown soaping up her chest so many times in the first few minutes of character intros that it starts to play like a joke, setting a tone for the remarkably silly zombie picture to come. Death Metal Zombies has great Slumber Party Appeal, by which I mean it’s a harmless, cartoonish horror relic that most kids would still need to sneak past their disapproving parents. It’s got such a warm slumber party vibe that its recent screening at The Broad (presented by friend of the podcast Sara Nicole Storm, of Nail Club) wasn’t at all soured or interrupted by the one audience member who loudly snored through its back half; if anything, he added to the authenticity of the full slumber party experience.

You might expect that a backyard metalsploitation relic from the video store era would be overloaded with grotesque D.I.Y. gore gags, but Death Metal Zombies only delivers a few gross-out moments here or there: a severed hand squirting blood, an unsuspecting jogger disemboweled in a pool of blood, a stabbed anus spewing blood, a skeleton discarded in a victim’s bed — gooey with blood, of course. Overall, though, it’s way more interested in delivering quirky character comedy that is in setting up those gory payoffs. Todd Jason Cook wrote, directed, produced, starred, and bloodied up this regional horror picture in suburban Texas with his friends (including then-wife Lisa Cook, now Lisa DeWild) seemingly as an excuse to party. There’s a thin, single-sentence plot involving a radio contest and a cursed cassette tape, but most scenes involve suburban Texas metalheads sitting around in bedrooms, garages, and public parks, doing nothing in particular while the soundtrack blares tunes from then-current signees to Relapse Records. It’s just wall-to-wall metal jams playing over the goofiest line readings this side of Motern Media, foretelling Matt Farley’s career-long project of making creature features that care more about quirky side character’s meaningless conversations than they do about the monsters on the poster. The film’s heavy metal iconography promises a brutal face-melter of nonstop demonic gore, but in practice it’s a “Gee-willikers!,” Leave It to Beaver-style sitcom that just happens to feature metalheads turning into flesh-eating zombies. It’s a shockingly wholesome affair for a movie with a title card that announces “Music by Putrid Stench [et. al].” The current 30th Anniversary re-release even concludes with a blooper reel. In a just world, all Evangelical Christians who believe metalheads to be devil worshipping, child murdering psychopaths would be forced to watch this film in its entirety, so they can see the truth: metalheads are just dorks in black t-shirts.

The metalhead friend group we meet during the opening credits find themselves in supernatural peril after they win a radio contest to own the only copy of an exclusive new single from their favorite death metal band, Living Corpse. When jamming out to that tape in their garage hangout spot, their headbanging choreography is interrupted by the band, who magically materialize and issue commands that they kill, kill, kill anyone in striking distance. The poor metalhead dorks are then “transformed” into ravenous zombies, which mostly manifests in dark circles of eye makeup and a slowed-down gait. Their friends who were lucky enough to not hear the cursed single are then tasked to find a way to play the cassette backwards in order to reverse the zombification process — something that proves difficult with commercial equipment. Meanwhile, a serial killer in a Nixon mask is also on the hunt to kill, kill, kill his fellow Texans in a B-plot that is ambiguously (if at all) connected to the central metalsploitation conceit. Even when the zombie & Nixon-mask violence escalates in the back half, the movie registers as deeply unserious. Every single blow is punctuated with a corresponding stock sound effect: video game foley for punches, squelches for stabs. When characters lob insults at their enemies, they read as more silly than vicious: “Dork,” “Pus-wad,” “The Baby Bunch,” etc. The ultimate heroic goal of the picture is not to destroy the zombie hoard so much as it is to reunite the disbanded friend group so they can rock out to metal tunes together once again. Todd Cook’s camcorder vision of true friendship persevering in an increasingly harsh world is a heartwarming one, even if it is best enjoyed when you’re 13-years-old and sneaking room-temperature beers past your sleeping parents while a buddy from school is spending the night.

-Brandon Ledet

NOFF 2025: Ground Report

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In my previous dispatch covering this year’s New Orleans Film Fest, I previewed a few selections from the program before they premiered in-person, primarily focusing on documentaries about niche pop culture relics: the 80s house music scene in Chicago, the recurring 90s SNL character Pat!, and the bare-all story of the noise-rock circus act Butthole Surfers. Now that the festival’s in-person portion has concluded (with Virtual Cinema selections streaming online through Sunday, 11/2), I’m here to log some on-the-ground reporting to cover selections I caught on the big screen. The five titles reviewed below are all narrative features that screened during NOFF at various venues throughout the city (namely, The CAC, The Prytania, and The Broad) — some to ecstatic crowds, others to little fanfare. They’re loosely ranked from my personal favorites to my least favorites, but all are worth checking out if you have any interest in their reported style or subject. There will be one final dispatch covering this year’s NOFF in the form of a post-fest podcast with local critic Bill Arceneaux once the virtual portion has concluded in early November, and then the film festival department of the Swampflix newsroom will be furloughed until French Film Fest returns to The Prytania in the Spring, same as ever year.

The Plague

As NOFF coincides with my annual Halloween Season horror bingeing, I always find myself scanning the program for titles that fit both needs. This year, there were more horror-adjacent titles on offer than usual, including a few straight-up horror comedies about sex curses (see below), sexy zombies (see further below), and sex-obsessed Nice Guy puppets (Your Own Flavor). The scariest movie I’ve seen all month, however, was a coming-of-age drama about hazing rituals at a middle school-age water polo camp. I don’t know that Charlie Polinger’s debut feature The Plague fully qualifies as a proper Horror Film, but it neatly fits into a social-anxiety horror canon with titles like Eighth Grade, The Fits, and Raw. At the very least, it’s itchy & squirmy enough to register as a psychological thriller, and its lengthy scenes of slow-motion underwater cinematography offer it an otherworldly, nightmarish beauty that verges on the supernatural — a welcome break from the all-too-real dramatizations of school age bullying. A near-guaranteed moneymaker genre in recent years, horror offers up-and-coming directors the chance to take stylish risks audiences won’t sign on for otherwise, so it’s not especially surprising to learn that Polinger’s next project is going to be an adaptation of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” for A24, starring Mikey Madison (which was previously adapted by Roger Corman into what is comfortably one of the greatest horror films of all time).

The closest The Plague comes to having “a star” is Joel Edgerton in a supporting role as the water polo camp’s whistle-blowing sad sack coach, who’s scarcely present to supervise. The rest of the main cast are preteen boys who’ve been largely left alone to establish their own social hierarchy, with newcomer Everett Blunck playing Ben, the latest, gangliest addition to the crew. The title refers to a hazing ritual the boys have invented in which the most awkward kid among them has been socially diagnosed with a vaguely defined plague that manifests as a skin-shredding rash, banishing him from any direct interaction with the rest of the class. Ben is unsure how much he wants to participate in this ritual at first, but he’s ultimately willing to punch down as long as it means he’s not the lowest rung on the social ladder. That status doesn’t last forever, though, and the gradual, subtle ways he gets “infected” by the plague are horrifically familiar to anyone who remembers having an “awkward phase” at that age. The Plague hits especially hard for Millennials who suffered their worst social nightmares in the early 2000s, since its 2003 setting is consistently anchored by eerily accurate cultural markers like endless repetitions of the “Okayyy” Lil Jon punchlines from Chappelle’s Show, a forgotten mating call from the time. It’s remarkably well observed in depicting the gendered bullying that boys suffer at that age (with the neighboring girls synchronized-swimming camp being quarantined to a walled-off realm worthy of its own sister movie), with only the otherworld liminality of swimming underwater to offer any sense of relief. It’s an nerve-racking film about how all children are monsters, one that’ll make you glad you never have to be one again.

Fucktoys

The Plague will enjoy a Prestige Season theatrical rollout in hopes of landing on a few High Profile critics’ Best of the Year Lists, boosting its public profile. The future of Annapurna Sriram’s campy sex comedy Fucktoys is much hazier in the film-distro crystal ball, partly due to the expletive in its title (and the 100 minutes of depravity that ensues). Sriram herself stars as down-on-her-luck sex worker who learns in the opening scene that the reason she’s been going through it lately is that she’s been struck with a curse. When she asks her most trusted psychic (local legend Big Freedia, in a scene-stealing role) how this could’ve happened, the psychic shrugs it off with the explanation that sometimes “It be like that.” After consulting several other psychics around town for a second opinion the way cancer patients will desperately bounce from doctor to doctor, she quickly accepts that the curse is real, and starts working overtime to earn the money for a lamb-sacrificing ritual that will lift said curse, freeing her from the string of heartbreaks & rotten luck that has been derailing her life. Of course, this premise is mostly an excuse for Sriram to travel around town from john to john on her vintage moped as she gets her cash in order, providing the plot structure needed to justify flooding the screen with quirky side characters and one-off sex gags. Then, things get genuinely horrific as the threat shifts from vague supernatural curse magic to real-life john with drug & ego issues, consciously souring the mood in frank acknowledgement of the dangerous risks that come with regular sex work (i.e., men).

For a low-budget sex comedy filmed mostly on the industrial backroads of rural Louisiana, Fucktoys has an impressively stylish look to it. Shot on film and decorated with a self-driven dedication to Swinging 60s psychedelia, it looks like a dusty Polaroid found locked away in a box of antique sex toys. Sriram sets the film in a fictional, fantastic setting she calls Trashworld, made entirely out of what appears to be hand-built sets and thrifted vintage clothing. That setting and the over-the-top character work will likely earn Fucktoys a lot of convenient comparisons to the Mortville trash world of John Waters’s oeuvre, but in practice it hits a lot closer to Gregg Araki’s work: sincerely sexy & sensual while still remaining outrageously bratty & garish. The film certainly has a lot of harsh political messaging behind its flippantly slutty comedic antics, constantly calling attention to how the wealthy live by different rules than the rest of us, putting the servant class at constant risk. Sriram just works hard to make sure she’s not portraying the sex-worker lifestyle as a nonstop misery parade, seeking out the pleasure & humor in every scenario where money & hexes aren’t ruining the vibe. It’s the kind of bongripping comedy where the protagonist owns a full Doug Funny wardrobe of the same uniform outfit in multiple copies, and if someone writes down a phone number in lipstick, it’s almost certain to be 555-666-0420.

Queens of the Dead

The joke-to-laugh ratio in Tina Romero’s debut zomcom Queens of the Dead is not nearly as successful as Fucktoys‘, but it’s got a similar, admirable sense of political flippancy. George Romero’s daughter builds off her family name here by staging a standard zombie siege picture in the exact style pioneered by her father; the location under siege by the zombie horde just happens to be a drag club. A queer cast of misfit characters (played by the likes of Love Lies Bleeding‘s Katy O’Brian, I Saw the TV Glow‘s Jack Haven, Drag Race‘s Nina West, Pose‘s Dominique Jackson, and comedy legend Margaret Cho) hole up in a Brooklyn gay bar during a cookie-cutter zombie breakout, with one straight-guy straight man on hand to play their comic foil (Quincy Dunn-Baker). All the crew has to do is survive long enough to ride a Pride Parade float out of town at dawn without turning on each other under the pressure of the nonstop zombie invasion. Petty grievances about past professional betrayals, disrespected identity markers, and refusal to adapt to the new rules of drag bubble to the surface as they pass time at the nightclub’s open bar, but they repeatedly revert to the assertion that they’re Family, and all they have is each other in a world that would gladly tear them apart.

Queens of the Dead is heavy on jokes and light on gore. Sure, a character might suffer a nasty rat bite or axe wound here or there, but Romero never goes for the obligatory horde-hands disemboweling spectacle of the Living Dead series, tastefully choosing to keep her characters’ organs on the insides of their bodies. Instead, she nods to her father’s legacy with winking one liners like “When there’s no more room in Hell . . . there’s an app for that.” To that end, it’s amusing that much of the undead ghouls the central Family has to protect themselves from are the drag-enthusiast public, who continue to scroll & post for Insta clout well after they’re infected by the zombie plague. You’d think they’d be fighting off undead MAGA instead, but I suppose that supply would be short in Brooklyn. The overall effect is less gnarly or politically savvy than it is, simply, cute. I don’t know that it would’ve been made or widely distributed (soon, through Shudder) without the director’s connection to the larger Romero legacy, but it’s got a good heart and it easily passes the Mark Kermode-patented Six Laughs Test for determining whether a comedy qualifies for a passing grade.

The Testament of Ann Lee

The only film on this list that isn’t a debut feature is, thus, the one that bears the greatest weight of expectation, so I suspect it’s one I might’ve ranked higher had I been totally blindsided by it. Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee arrived at the festival with pre-packaged Awards Season prestige, complete with its own security guards scanning the audiences for smartphone pirates who might dare to leak a camrip before the film’s official late-December release. Fastvold is most prominently discussed on the prestige cinema scene right now in the context of her careerlong professional collaboration with husband Brady Corbet (with whom she co-wrote last year’s Oscar-nominated The Brutalist, as well as this immediate follow-up), but it’s her 2020 period drama The World to Come that most had me excited to see her back in the director’s chair. A historical lesbian romance with an unusually deep bleak streak, The World to Come set an expectation for dramatic heartbreak that The Testament of Ann Lee never comes close to achieving, despite the severity of its own story. Instead, Fastvold indulges in the stylistic experiment of making a deeply bleak movie musical, finding more fascination than resonation with her titular historical subject: the enigmatic founder of the American religious sect The Shakers. The most the two films have in common, really, is their casting’s assertion that Christopher Abbott would make a terrible husband.

In a way, The Shakers make perfect sense as the subject for a musical, given that their worship practices involve rhythmic dancing & chanting that could inspire captivating filmic spectacle. Think of the communal breathing/grieving ritual in Midsommar, repeated at feature length. The problem is that the Shaker hymns composer Daniel Blumberg extrapolates into full musical numbers don’t really go anywhere. When Shaker founder Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried) is imprisoned for her heretical beliefs, she sings repetitions of the phrase, “I hunger and thirst, I hunger and thirst, I hunger and thirst” with no lyrical variation for minutes on end, to the point where the audience is more exhausted than the character. It’s her belief system itself that saves the film from total tedium, though. Ann Lee was persecuted for daring to ask whether society would be better off if we all agreed to sing & dance instead of having sex, ever. It turns out the answer depends on how bad the sex you’re having is (i.e., whether you’re married to Hollywood hunk Christopher Abbott). The Testament of Ann Lee is most impressive in how it works as both a sincere depiction of its subject’s religious ecstasy and as a harsh criticism of religion as a mechanism for making one person’s sexual hang-ups everyone else’s problem. I have a feeling that if Blumberg’s songs were better realized and if Fastvold’s name didn’t carry so much weight from previous projects, I’d be singing its praises instead of downplaying its successes. As is, it’s a memorably strange anomaly, an indulgence I suppose Fastvold has well earned by working on knockout titles like The World to Come, The Childhood of a Leader, The Brutalist, and my beloved Vox Lux.

Mad Bills to Pay

A more reasonable person wouldn’t have any pre-screening expectations for The Testament of Ann Lee, but I have been made unreasonable by the year-long attention I pay to movie podcasts with the budget & access to send critics to international film festivals. Maybe the Oscar Buzz generators of Awards Season podcasts like Prestige Junkie & The Big Picture that put movies like Ann Lee on the radar for large audiences are a reasonable thing to listen to; I dunno. What’s really shameful is the close attention I pay to festival-coverage episodes of the NYC cinephile podcasts Film Comment & The Last Thing I Saw, which often get me hyped up for microbudget oddities that have no name recognition outside a small circle of obscurity-obsessed pundits who trade deep-cut titles as a form of social currency half a country away from where I live. Sometimes, my nerdy notetaking during those conversations pays off wonderfully, as it prompted me to catch The Plague as soon as it was available, one of the most rewarding theatrical experiences I’ve had all year — festival or no. Often, it’ll lure me into making time for the kinds of underplayed, subtle-to-a-fault indie dramas I have no personal interest in beyond their value to The Discourse. Again, I acknowledge that it is shameful. I’ll also acknowledge that I had no business watching Mad Bills to Pay in particular, which seems to have spoken to that NYC cinephile crowd specifically because it’s set in The Bronx, a lesser-filmed borough of the city (as opposed to the more often-seen Brooklyn & Manhattan).

Mad Bills to Pay is a summer-bummer indie drama about ill-prepared parents-to-be in The Bronx. It’s a very quiet movie about very loud people, a paradox from the Sean Baker School of Character Studies. Newcomer Juan Collado stars as the 19-year-old Rico, who sells home-mixed cocktails called “Nutcrackers” to people partying on the beach, drawing attention with the constant sales pitch, “Nutties, nutties, nutties, nutties!” A macho brat in a domestic world entirely populated by women, most of his non-“nutties” vocabulary consists of variations of “Babe, babe, babe,” and “Bro, bro, bro” as he whines like a toddler who’s not getting enough attention (or, more often, not getting his way). After getting accustomed to Rico’s daily rounds of video games, bong rips, junk food, and public displays of alcoholism, we’re confronted with the out-of-nowhere revelation that he’s going to be a father, having impregnated the 16-year-old Destiny (fellow first-time actor Destiny Checho). The two children are very obviously not ready to have children of their own, which inspires endless shouting matches as they struggle & fail to assert their maturity to mothers who know better. Those frequent top-volume arguments are in direct contrast with the docudrama filmmaking style, framed with the cold, impartial distance of a security camera. Every single scene is another indication that the parents-to-be should seriously consider adoption or abortion instead of introducing a baby into their volatile relationship, all the way to the very end when it’s far too late. Meanwhile, a seemingly authentic portrait of Dominican American communal life in The Bronx is sketched out in background detail. First-time director Joel Alfonso Vargas delivers a confident, competent version of a kind of festival-circuit movie I always struggle to personally connect with, as my tastes tend to drift towards the more abstracted, dreamlike end of the medium. Since I’ve also failed to connect with recent years’ other festival darlings like Past Lives, Janet Planet, and Aftersun, I’m willing to chalk this one up to the go-to critical quality markers like Subtlety, Nuance, and Restraint just not being my thing. Your own mileage may vary, especially if you have any affinity for day-drinking in The Bronx.

-Brandon Ledet

El Vampiro (1957)

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Between watching the infinite sequels to The Mummy & The Invisible Man and a few one-off Gothic horrors like 13 Ghosts and The Undying Monster, I’ve seen a lot of classic horror relics this month, mostly running from the 1930s through the early 1960s. There may be more exciting, grotesque monstrosities to be found in later decades like the splatter-fest 1980s or the neon-bathed horrors of the now, but there’s something about the black-and-white scare pictures of old that call to me every Halloween season. It’s purely a matter of decor. I love spending time in the old dark houses, spooky castles, and foggy moors of the classic horror milieu, the thicker the artificial fog the better. It’s simply the most Halloween-appropriate set decoration you can find in cinema, alternating between sound-stage surrealism and department-store deadstock. That’s at least what was on my mind while watching the 1957 vampire picture El Vampiro, which I purchased on DVD while traveling in Mexico. El Vampiro doesn’t achieve anything you haven’t seen before in a hundred other vampire pictures; it comfortably sits at the exact midpoint between first-wave Universal Monster movies and their later Hammer Horror echoes. And yet, because it’s so over-decorated with Spirit Halloween Store set decor, it’s exceptionally well suited to Halloween season programming. It’s the kind of movie where every surface is veiled behind a thick layer of cobwebs regardless of whether someone’s “living” in the space, with servants on staff. Every single object in the frame is stubbornly ooky-spooky, regardless of logic or necessity, which is exactly how horror cinema should be decorated this time year.

It’s not entirely fair to say El Vampiro lacks narrative or imagistic innovation. The film is often credited for a couple major contributions to the classic horror canon. Mainly, its financial success kickstarted the Mexican horror cinema boom of the 1960s that led to more memorably outlandish works like The Brainiac & Santos vs The Vampire Women. More improbably, it’s also credited for being the first vampire picture to feature the stereotypical elongated canine fangs, as the Bela Lugosi version of Dracula was fangless and the fanged Christopher Lee version had not yet materialized. Surprisingly, the film’s titular vampiro is not a version of Count Dracula, but rather an entirely new bloodsucking gentleghoul. Germán Robles stars as Count Lavud (Conde Karol de Lavud, to be more accurate), a Dracula Type who keeps his coffin in a spooky old Mexican estate, adorned with the aforementioned cobwebs. His screen presence is clearly inspired by the iconic Lugosi version of Dracula, as he hides his lower face under a lifted cape with the same dramatic mannerisms, inviting bright studio lights to illuminate his hypnotically handsome eyes. Like all versions of Dracula (and its copyright-infringing Nosferatu offshoots), his monstrous motivations are also mostly a matter of real estate: in this case wooing ownership of his new spooky castle abode away from a grieving niece who doesn’t yet know she was born into a vampire bloodline. All other traditional vampire lore is present here too. The vamps don’t appear in mirrors; they’re ill at the sight of a crucifix; they sleep through daylight in coffins lined with their home soil; etc. Amusingly, Lavud also frequently transforms into a flapping rubber bat that flies around the haunted house set in an effect you’d more likely see in Bela Lugosi’s poverty row pictures like Devil Bat or Return of the Vampire than anything produced by a major studio like Universal.

If there’s any notable variation on the old school vampire picture here, it’s in the way women play a central role in the story. Not only is most of the runtime ceded to the distraught niece’s gradual realization that she was born to a vampire clan, but her surviving aunt is a Count Lavud convert who works on the bloodsucker’s evil behalf while he lurks in the shadows offscreen. Every time Aunt Eloise (Carmen Montejo) appears, she’s accompanied by a howling wind that guarantees her a dramatic entrance, even if most of her job is gaslighting her niece into sticking around on a series of domestic sets fit for a televised soap opera. While those two women’s quiet power struggle takes up most of the runtime, however, Germán Robles is very clearly the star of the picture. After transforming into a bat and draining a sleeping woman of her blood beneath the opening credits, he then disappears until about halfway into the film, when he re-emerges from his coffin to great musical fanfare and makes direct, hypnotic eye contact with the audience. It’s Robles’s commanding screen presence as the handsome, clean-shaven vampire that is mostly credited for the film’s success, as well as the success of the many Mexican horror cheapies that followed in his wake. After reprising the Count Lavud role a year later in The Vampire’s Coffin, Robles continued to ride that wave in subsequent horror novelties like The Castle of the Monsters, The Blood of Nostradamus, and even my beloved The Brainiac. From the few titles I’ve seen in that 1960s Mexican horror wave (mostly ones starring world-famous luchador Santo), El Vampiro‘s garish sense of Halloween season decor also continued in the films to follow. It makes for a wonderfully spooky atmosphere, especially recommended if you’ve already exhausted all of the Universal & Hammer titles that routinely get a lot more international attention this time of year.

-Brandon Ledet

The Watcher in the Woods (1980)

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A longtime Swampflix favorite, the 1983 Jack Clayton-directed Ray Bradbury adaptation Something Wicked This Way Comes has been unavailable for home viewing since at least as far back as 2017, when we first covered it for Movie of the Month. Thankfully, that is no longer the case. As of this October, it’s finally been added to Disney+ for anyone interested. Back when we first discussed Something Wicked, Brandon talked about that film in conversation with another Disney-funded Kiddie Horror picture, The Watcher in the Woods, which still remains unavailable online. Since Something Wicked wasn’t available to borrow from my local library or from my local video rental place and could only be found on Disney’s proprietary streaming service, I was curious how hard it would be to find The Watcher in the Woods, and lo and behold, it was easier for me to lay hands on it in the physical world than it was online. Deciding that it would make a good “Bette Davis handles a spooky jewelry box” double feature with Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte, it was the perfect time to check it out. 

Teenage Jan (Lynn-Holly Johnson) and elementary-aged Ellie (Kyle Richards) are American sisters whose composer father (David McCallum) has been tasked with putting on an opera in England. This leads to them renting a large, old home from the reclusive Mrs. Aylwood (Davis), whose daughter disappeared roughly three decades before. Mrs. Aylwood rarely rents out the home, but Jan resembles her long-missing daughter Karen, and so she opens the house up to the Curtis family. Even before the ink on the lease is dry, strange things begin to happen; Jan sees images of a blindfolded girl in reflections and Ellie learns things that she shouldn’t know and, when asked where she heard these facts, attributes the knowledge to her new puppy, Nerak (Karen backwards, obviously). Jan strikes up a budding relationship with handsome neighbor Mike Fleming (Benedict Taylor), from whom they get the puppy, and Ellie’s writing of “NERAK” in the dust on a barn window leads Mike’s mother to confess that she was there the night that Karen disappeared, along with two other teens, Tom Colley and John Keller. The three of them were doing some classic “secret society at midnight in the old chapel” shenanigans when lightning struck the building and set it ablaze, causing the great bell to fall where Karen had been standing. Only Tom Colley looked back and saw that she wasn’t there when the bell fell, and no remains for Karen were ever found. Can Jan convince several adults that some entity, the titular unknown watcher in the woods, is trying to help Karen get home? 

This movie scared the shit out of me when I was a kid. Although most old television broadcast schedules are long gone now, this isn’t so for the Disney Channel, which allowed me to pin down the actual date that I saw this film for the first time: October 27, 1995, when I was eight years old. This review may very well go up on the thirtieth anniversary of that date, and in all those decades, I’ve never forgotten it, with some of its images haunting me to this day. I didn’t remember much about the ending, given that it’s a bit overcomplicated (the fact that Disney rushed release to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Bette Davis’s first film role only for the film to be panned, resulting in quickly pulling the film and reshooting the ending, tells you all that you need to know), but I’ve never stopped thinking about poor Karen in that mirror. There’s something truly, deeply haunting about this film, and I’m surprised that its contemporary reception was so poor (and I’m talking about the release of the currently available “complete” version). Maybe it was simply that people really weren’t ready for a family brand like Disney to release a film that was this scary; this was, after all, several years before the creation of the PG-13 rating, and it premiered at the beginning of the decade when it would become more commonplace for children’s media to be intentionally frightening, at least in small amounts. The world that The Watcher in the Woods premiered in was one that was still a few years out from E.T. the Extraterrestrial, The NeverEnding Story, Return to Oz, and even Something Wicked This Way Comes, so maybe it was simply a little too ahead of its time. Hell, it even presages The Evil Dead a little, as this contains what may be the earliest use of the Sam Raimi-style “tracking camera.” Shots from the point of view of the villain (although in this case there’s no real “villain” to speak of and the titular watcher is ultimately a benevolent presence, even if some of its actions create dangerous situations) are nothing new, but the low-to-the-ground “Deadite view” hadn’t really taken off yet, and this film has that several times. 

In reading about the film and older reviews of it, I was struck by the many mentions of the unimaginative shooting, and I find that surprising. The film effectively captures a melancholy mood through many images of the woods surrounding the Curtises’ temporary home, and even when the kids are excited to discover a pond, it’s not exactly a cheerful sight, all fog and murky water. The house is effectively spooky, and the other environs that we see, like the ruins of the chapel and the inside of Tom Colley’s shack, are also rendered very effectively on screen. It may simply be that in an era where most media is shot so flatly and with so little attention to cinematic craftsmanship that I’ve become accustomed to gobbling up slop, so that when something that would have been considered the basic minimum needed to create atmosphere seems revelatory to me. Regardless, this is a nice little intro-to-horror for any kid who might be interested, even if the wrap-up and conclusion won’t stick in their minds. If you’re looking for something in the same vein that’s a little more adult, try satiating your Bette Davis sweet tooth with Burnt Offerings.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #250: Invisible Men

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Welcome to Episode #250 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of sci-fi horror relics inspired by the H.G. Wells novel The Invisible Man, starting with James Whale’s classic 1933 adaptation for Universal, starring Claude Rains.

0:00 Welcome
02:08 Prince of Darkness (1987)
08:25 Scream, Pretty Peggy (1973)
11:50 Bring Her Back (2025)
14:23 The Perfect Neighbor (2025)
22:55 The Mummy (1932)
29:25 Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

33:22 The Invisible Man (1933)
47:31 Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951)
1:01:15 The Invisible Man vs The Human Fly (1957)
1:15:43 The Invisible Dr. Mabuse (1962)

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– The Podcast Crew

The Atomic Gill-man

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Based on the commemorative toys, posters, and Blu-ray box sets that group him in with the rest of the riff raff, you might forget that The Gill-man is a latecomer addition to the Universal Monsters brand. 1954’s Creature from the Black Lagoon was made decades after the respective premieres of Universal’s A-Lister monsters Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man, who had already been wrung dry for all they were worth in now-forgotten sequels like Son of Dracula and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man long before The Gill-man first emerged. The initial 1930s run of the Universal Monsters brand under studio executive Carl Laemmle Jr. were all earnestly committed to a Gothic, German Expressionist mood that birthed some of the greatest horror iconography in the history of Hollywood filmmaking. Then, a successful repertory run for those pictures in the 1940s convinced the studio that there was more money to be made, especially among younger audiences, so the same monsters were rushed out (with their new friend The Wolf Man in tow) in a flood of by-the-numbers sequels aimed directly at children. By the 1950s, that second wave of Universal horror titles had long crested, detectable only in the scummy sea foam of the Famous Monsters’ team-ups with the comedy duo Abbott & Costello. It was during that post-boom lull that the studio gave life to The Gill-man, cashing in on an entirely different genre’s newfound popularity.

From the very first minute of Creature of the Black Lagoon, it’s immediately clear that the film was produced for its commercial value as Atomic Age sci-fi, not as a conscious contribution to Universal Monsters tradition. The film opens with a stereotypically 50s sci-fi monologue about the evolution of living organisms emerging from the sea to breathe air and walk on land, suggesting that the next logical evolutionary step would be for humanity to mutate again, adapting to life in outer space. Before we can leave this oxygenated prison planet behind to embrace our inevitable intergalactic future, however, we must take a step back to investigate how we got here. The Gill-man is a living, swimming specimen of the missing link between us and our amphibious forefathers: half-man/half-fish. He is discovered during an archeological dig in the upper Amazon, led by scientists who expect only to find ancient Gill-man bones in the mud beneath the Amazon River. As they scuba dive in The Gill-man’s home waters, he swims just outside their sight & reach, studying them in return (and demonstrating a particular fascination with the fashionably swimsuited Julie Adams). Once his presence is discovered, the scientists debate whether to shoot The Gill-man with cameras or with a harpoon, whether to treat him like a fellow man or like the catch of the day. Some see a monster, while the more enlightened see a mirror.

Universal was smart to hire Jack Arnold to direct The Gill-man’s debut, as other Arnold titles like The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Space Children, and It Came from Outer Space would go on to rank among the best that Atomic Age sci-fi had to offer. They were also smart to cash in on the 3D filmmaking craze of that era, allowing Arnold’s crew to perfect underwater 3D filmmaking months (months!) before James Cameron was even born. As gorgeous as the lengthy sequences of The Gill-man stalking his human prey underwater can be, however, the true wonder of the film is the creature’s design, the best of Universal’s monster creations since Jack Pierce transformed Boris Karloff into Frankenstein(‘s monster). Disney animator Milicent Patrick sketched a perfect aquatic-horror figure in The Gill-man, and her design remained remarkably intact as it came to life as the rubber-suited monster we see onscreen. The Gill-man was portrayed by two different actors depending on where he staged his attacks (Ricou Browning in the water, Ben Chapman on the land), alternating between lumbering beast and balletic swim-dancer. The rhythms & beats of the story are typical to Atomic Age creature features of its kind, but it’s the elegance of The Gill-man’s look and his underwater movements that earned him a place among the other grotesque icons of the Universal Monsters brand.

If The Gill-man shares anything in common with the elder statesman monsters of the Universal horror canon, it’s that he was also dragged back out of the water for needless cash-in sequels. Both 1955’s Revenge of the Creature and 1956’s The Creature Walks Among Us spend the first half of their runtimes swimming in the exact waters of the original Black Lagoon, with scientists hunting the poor fish beast until he finally lashes out for vengeance . . . again & again. Only, in the respective second halves of those films’ ropey plots, the creature is relocated to new, novel locales so he can expand the scope of his out-of-water mayhem. In Revenge of the Creature, he’s trapped in a Sea World-style amusement park in Miami for public display, which inevitably leads to a creature-feature version of Blackfish in which one of the captive fish(men) gets violent revenge on his aquarium prison guards. The Creature Walks Among Us then returns to The Gill-man’s Atomic Age beginnings, with scientists forcibly mutating him into an air-breathing, clothes-wearing half-man as an experiment to determine whether humanity can rapidly adapt to living in outer space. Overall, neither sequels is especially essential or even memorable, but they do offer some novelty in depicting The Gill-man flipping cars and invading suburban homes instead of sinking boats. They also firmly establish the poor creature’s status as Universal’s most empathetic monster icon. Over the course of three films, The Gill-man is put through even more needless, inhuman suffering than Frankenstein’s creature. He’s hunted, drugged, harpooned, set on fire, imprisoned, forced to work as an underwater circus act, and then, as the final indignity, they make him wear pants. The only way it could’ve been worse is if they made him work a desk job.

The Gill-man’s sci-fi genre markers are not a total anomaly within the Universal Monsters canon. If nothing else, their adapted figures of Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll, and The Invisible Man helped define what the mad scientist trope would come to look like in cinema instead of on the page. It’s just that The Gill-man arrived so late to the party that his outings feel entirely separate from the heavily crossed-over run of Universal Monster sequels that preceded them by a decade or two. Truly, the only reason that The Gill-man is so heavily featured in the Universal Monsters branding is because he looks really, really cool. The visual stylings of Milicent Patrick’s creature design and the underwater camerawork of Jack Arnold’s second unit are what makes him such an enduring sci-fi horror figure despite being so obviously dated to 1950s sci-fi in particular. Creature from the Black Lagoon is an all-timer creature feature that’s very much rooted in its time.

-Brandon Ledet

The Seventh Victim (1943)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

The Seventh Victim is a strange little movie. At only 71 minutes, it moves at a breakneck speed, not unlike other noir thrillers like D.O.A. or The Phantom Lady, and although this is billed as a horror picture, it bears much more resemblance to the former genre. That contemporary audiences found it muddled and somewhat difficult to follow is not a surprise, as this is also a hallmark of some of the great staples of film noir, like The Big Sleep. You’ll notice that all of those linked titles are to reviews from yours truly in this year alone. I seem to have inadvertently turned 2025 into my personal year of reflecting back on the noir genre, which I didn’t realize until Brandon pointed out that every single Lagniappe podcast episode we have done since the beginning of July has been some kind of detective or otherwise noir-adjacent film. Even when we recently attempted to divert into more spooky-season appropriate fare, we only found ourselves viewing a double feature of horror movies which also played out like investigative dramas (The Undying Monster and 13 Ghosts). I didn’t expect that I would continue that trend with The Seventh Victim, but here we are. It’s also a prequel to Cat People?

Mary Gibson (Kim Hunter in her debut role) is summoned to the office of the headmistress of her school and is informed that her sister has stopped paying tuition. They offer her the opportunity to go to New York and find her sister, and promise that she can return to the school and finish her education with a kind of work study program, but a sympathetic teacher tells Mary that she was given this same deal once and regrets taking it, as it kept her from getting out into the world. Once she arrives in the city, Mary goes to the cosmetics company that her sister Jacqueline (Jean Brooks) owned, only to discover that Jackie sold the business to her business partner, Esther Redi (Mary Newton). One of the cosmetologists, Frances (Isabel Jewell), tells Mary that she saw Jackie the week before with a handsome man at a restaurant named Dante’s. It’s here that Mary discovers that Jackie rented a small room, and when she is allowed inside, she finds only a noose and a simple wooden chair, a macabre scene. Mary wistfully admits that Jackie always had a morbid preoccupation with suicide and dying on her own terms. Mary ends up meeting three men who seemingly assist her in locating her sister: Gregory Ward (Hugh Beaumont), a handsome lawyer who is secretly married to Jackie; Jason Hoag (Erford Gage), a fellow tenant in the rooms above Dante’s and a lapsed poet; and Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway), reprising his role from Cat People (in which he was killed), appearing here as Jackie’s psychiatrist. When a private eye Mary hires to find Jackie ends up killed and she sees strange men covering up the murder, she begins to unravel a conspiracy. 

This all sounds like a typical non-horror mystery plot, but it’s not long before we learn that Jackie admitted to Dr. Judd that she had been inducted into a group of Satan-worshippers known as “Palladists,” and that she had since become fearful of them. Although he was slow to believe her, he does agree to hide her, hence the reason that she seemingly disappeared. In the interim, the disciples of her cult have been searching tirelessly for her, and with it now appearing that Jackie was the person who killed the private detective, it’s only a matter of time before the police find her, and their creed requires that Jackie must die before she can reveal any more about the secret society.

There’s nothing supernatural at play here, or even anything that could be ambiguously occult. The Palladists here are fairly spooky, sure, but they’re also kind of like if you took all of Rosemary Woodhouse’s neighbors and made them much less malicious. Their organization is also completely dedicated to non-violence, which means that when they decide that Jackie must die, they simply abduct her to one of their apartments, put a poisoned chalice in front of her, and spend an entire day peer pressuring her into drinking it. It rides the line between goofy and spooky, and it’s only because of the intense noir-style shadow and camera work that it manages to be effective. When this fails, they also just let her go, although they send a switchblade wielding assassin after her; this results in a truly fantastic chiaroscuro chase sequence through the darkened city streets. This is a gorgeously photographed film, and it has one of the most nihilistic endings I’ve ever seen. I won’t spoil it for you, but Jackie ultimately escapes from her pursuers but not from herself, and when she returns to Dante’s she runs into one of the other neighbors, a terminally ill woman named Mimi (get it?) who has decided that she is going to go out for one last night of frivolity no matter how sick she feels, while Jackie seems defeated. The Bechdel Test is a dubious metric even on the best of days, but it’s worth noting that this film passes, in this scene between Mimi and Jackie, which is as unusual a twist as the presence of a Satan-worshipping cult. 

The complaints that The Seventh Victim is disjointed are not without merit. I’m generally willing to forgive this in older titles, especially as many surviving films that we do have from this era and the decades preceding it are incomplete, and I’ve gotten fairly accustomed to recognizing that sometimes I’m just going to have to accept that it’s on my imagination to fill in those gaps. As it turns out, this film was edited down to its current short runtime by director Mark Robson himself, at least according to interviews with his son given after Robson’s death. This means that we are missing some significant chunks, and there are definite seams where the film has had something spliced out; for instance, there is a scene where the principal of the school where Mary finds herself working in the city while she looks for her sister tells her that she has “another” visitor, pointing to a scene that was left on the editing room floor. The absence of some of these scenes is felt, but while I can’t know what the film looked like in a more complete form, I also don’t think that the film is lacking too much without them. This is an excellent little horror thriller with an unusual premise for the time, and it makes for a fun (and low commitment) viewing. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond