horror

Lagniappe Podcast: The Undying Monster (1942) & 13 Ghosts (1960)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss a double feature of high-style Gothic horror stories: John Brahm’s The Undying Monster (1942) and William Castle’s 13 Ghosts (1960).

00:00 Freaky Fridays at Double Trouble
10:00 Friday the 13th Part VIII – Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
16:53 Video Diary of a Lost Girl (2012)
23:45 Dial M for Murder (1954)

32:12 The Undying Monster (1942)
55:35 13 Ghosts (1960)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Transylvania 6-5000 (1985)

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I recently attended a screening of Elvira: Mistress of the Dark at my local coffeeshop in Austin, Double Trouble (I’m screening Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte and Cherry Falls there on 10/17 and 10/31, and there will be a presentation of Paprika on 10/24 despite my absence; all screenings are at 8 PM, but get there early so you can get drinks and food!), and attached to the beginning of the film was a trailer for another New World Video release, Transylvania 6-5000. I’ve been curious about this one for a long time, since a horror comedy starring Jeff Goldblum and Ed Begley, Jr., with a supporting role for Carol Kane, seemed right up my alley. Unfortunately, this movie is one of the least funny things that I have ever seen. 

Transylvania 6-5000 opens on Jack Harrison (Goldblum) and Gil Turner (Begley) being given instructions by their tabloid editor, who is also Gil’s father, to go to Transylvania and investigate the story behind a homemade videotape of two European men fleeing in terror from an unseen (except from the waist down) “Frankenstein” [‘s monster]. Harrison bristles at this, claiming that he was brought onto the paper to increase their journalistic integrity, to which the editor replies he was brought on to increase their vocabulary. Upon arrival in Transylvania, Gil makes himself the laughingstock of the village by outright asking a local if they have heard of any Frankenstein sightings, and Harrison takes particular umbrage at this because it might reduce his chances of hooking up with an American tourist, Elizabeth (Teresa Ganzel), who is traveling with her young daughter. The two “journalists” find themselves lodged at a creepy castle whose manager also happens to be the town’s mayor (convicted sex offender Jeffrey Jones), who tells them that he plans to turn the place into a kind of Disney park for Transylvanian history. Every member of the staff is obnoxious, from butler Radu (John Byner) who calls everyone “master,” his unrelentingly irritating wife Lipi (Kane), and the film’s worst character by many miles, a bellboy/servant named Fejos (Michael “Kramer” Richards). Also, there’s a vampire lady in the castle, too, played by Geena Davis. 

You can imagine my excitement at reading all of those names in the opening credits (except for the obvious one), which was greatly outmatched by the utter disappointment that followed. After his second scene, every time that Richards appeared on screen, I would groan aloud. His character’s schtick is 50% incomplete pratfalls and the other half is prop comedy, like delivering a telegram to our tabloid boys clutched in a fake hand, so that when they take it, they pull the hand out of his sleeve. It’s shockingly unfunny. I’ve read that a lot of the film was improvised, with the notation that the overlong scene in which Radu and Lupi attempt to prepare a grapefruit having only the script direction “cut and serve fruit,” and that’s apparent in the finished product. Richards’s Fejos character constantly repeats “Come here, I want to show you something” or some variation thereof during virtually every moment that he’s on screen, and it has much the same energy of a child trying to prank their parent before they’ve developed any stage patter. At the end of the film it’s revealed that Radu and Lupi were supposed to be posing as people with hunched backs for the entire film, but when this was mentioned, it came as a complete surprise to everyone watching this in my apartment. One of the better comedic elements in that it manages to land some of the time is the instant conversion of “Dr. Malavaqua” from sincere and gentlemanly to unhinged and diabolical (Jekyll and Hyde style) upon crossing the threshold into his lab. But for every time this resulted in a polite chuckle, there was Fejos slipping on a banana peel or appearing from behind a painting. 

One of the friends who attended this viewing said that a lot of the conversation about the film online is from people who remembered loving the movie as children and returning to it as adults and being greatly disappointed. This was only my first viewing, but I can understand that as their experience. The film’s final act reveals that the mayor and the chief of police have been keeping Dr. Malavaqua sequestered because the coincidental similarities between his patients and classic Hammer Horror icons are ruining their attempts to revamp the town’s image for the purposes of non-monster tourism. The vampiress stalking Gil in the castle is merely a nymphomaniac wearing Halloween fangs because she was convinced that no man could ever love her (hence her getting a nosejob from the good doctor); the wolfman is only a man afflicted with severe hypertrichosis and Malavaqua is giving him electrolysis; and so on and so forth. This is probably the scene that most people remember from their youth, as it’s one of the few in which something interesting is happening. I also infer from the film’s continuous presence on Tubi that it’s been a cheap and easy license for basic cable filler since the mid-nineties, and if you tune in only to the second half, you’d probably have fewer memories of Harrison’s agonizing pursuit of Elizabeth and thus fonder memories overall. 

I cannot in good conscience recommend this one. Goldblum’s character’s smug arrogance and the underbaked concept that his greater journalistic prowess is demonstrated by his repeated skepticism about Gil’s experiences make him unlikable to a degree that Goldblum’s normal, effortless charm is unable to surmount it. Kane has no chemistry with Byner, and her entire character is the same joke over and over again—trying to help uselessly and refusing to get out of the way—and I know you’re telling yourself that it sounds like something that would be well within Kane’s wheelhouse but she is seriously off of her game here. If you have fond memories of this one, save yourself the heartbreak of losing them. If you haven’t seen it, then spare yourself the trouble. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #249: The Toxic Avenger (1984 – 2025)

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Welcome to Episode #249 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon is joined by Pete Moran of the We Love to Watch podcast to discuss all things Toxie, the first superhero from New Jersey.

0:00 Welcome
05:50 Troma
19:50 The Toxic Avenger (1984, 2025)
1:11:50 The Toxic Avenger II-IV (1989-2000)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Famous Monster B-Lister: The Mummy

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It may just be a marketing term coined by fans, but the existence of Universal’s “Famous Monsters” brand suggests that there must also be a Famous Monsters B-List. Every celebrity industry has its own power-rankings hierarchy, with public-figure colleagues competing amongst themselves for job opportunities and name recognition. Within Universal’s early horror successes from the 1930s through the 1950s, the C-List is easy to define, as it’s mostly made up of semi-literary characters who get excluded from the nostalgic posters and action figures celebrating the brand: Mr. Hyde, The Phantom of the Opera, the bitchy little freaks Lugosi & Karloff play in The Black Cat, etc. Differentiating the B-List from the A-List is more of a case-by-case judgement call. To me, the official roster of Universal’s Famous Monsters can be cleanly split in half. The A-List celebrity monsters are Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man. They’re the ones who most often cross-pollinate each other’s sequels, and they’re the ones whose likeness you’re most likely to see on generic Halloween decorations year after year. That leaves The Mummy, The Invisible Man, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon as B-List celebrity monsters, the ones whose numerous sequels and knockoff plastic masks collect dust on the shelf while the A-List monsters get to run wild in the streets every October into perpetuity.

The most curious case of B-List monster celebrity has got to be The Mummy, since his first appearance in the lineup immediately followed the success of Universal’s Frankenstein & Dracula, a decade before The Wolf Man. The problem is that the poor walking corpse spent his entire career following Frankenstein & Dracula’s heavy footsteps, never truly becoming his own thing. 1932’s The Mummy was penned by John L. Balderson, who is most famous for writing the 1924 stage play version of Dracula that starred Bela Lugosi and was eventually adapted to the screen by Tod Browning, kicking off the Universal Monsters brand. Balderson was seemingly going through the motions in his secondary contribution to the canon, writing yet another story of a foreign-born romantic ghoul who uses his evil powers of hypnosis to woo a young woman he believes to be the reincarnation of his one true love. Only, that archetype is instead played here by Lugosi’s career-long professional rival Boris Karloff, whose monstrous figure is most closely associated with Frankenstein’s monster, further minimizing The Mummy as a Famous Monsters footnote. Stuck between the lecherous behavior of one A-List Famous Monster and the walking-corpse physicality of another, The Mummy was destined to be relegated to the horror celebrity B-List, to the point where his initial onscreen outing is often confused for details from its various sequels & spoofs.

The Mummy pictured in the Universal Monsters branding never appears onscreen in 1932’s The Mummy; that’s a mummy of a different name. At the start of the picture, Karloff’s mummified Egyptian sorcerer Imhotep does appear wrinkled & bandaged as another monster creation from legendary make-up artist Jack Pierce, who also crafted the actor’s more famous look in Frankenstein. We just never see him moving outside the confines of his sarcophagus while wearing that get-up. After dismissing ancient curses warning against it as Egyptian “mumbo jumbo,” some naive archeologists invade Imhotep’s tomb to pilfer cultural artifacts for career-making museum exhibits, mistakenly activating the long-dormant loverboy’s corpse by reading the forbidden scrolls he was buried with aloud. Once awakened, Imhotep immediately leaves his tomb & rags behind to work on reclaiming his lost love through ancient magic spells, transforming from a dried up corpse to a mildly disconcerting gentleman with sun-damaged skin and glowing, hypnotic eyes. We never get to witness this bodily transformation, nor is there any shot of Karloff schlepping around in the famous mummy rags before putting on a more respectable fez-and-robe ensemble. The mummy’s walk out of his tomb is left mostly to the audience’s imagination, as the movie is more of a classy mood-setter than it is a proper creature feature. It leaves that cheap business to its many sequels, headlined by an entirely different mummy.

Although its many sequels frequently repurpose footage from the flashbacks to the undead Imhotep’s days as a living priest and self-proclaimed King of the Gods, they immediately swap him out for a new mummy named Kharis. Since the first of Universal’s Mummy films only has a couple shots of its titular monster in the iconic bandages, the sequels have to start over and dream up something more recognizable (i.e., more marketable) without relying on the familiarity of Boris Karloff’s mug. Weirdly, that leaves the 1940 follow-up The Mummy’s Hand both more archetypal and lesser seen than the original film it was tasked to rework. Getting ahead of the next decade’s trend of pairing Universal’s Famous Monsters with Abbott & Costello, The Mummy’s Hand already stars two over-their-heads Brooklyn goofballs who get into a scrape with the famous monster. The out-of-place American archeologists are desperate for a big score while shopping the markets of Egypt, where they again ignore locals’ warnings & curses and pry open the tomb of a long-dormant mummy, in this case Kharis. Again, that mummy is liberated from his sarcophagus and immediately seeks to reconnect with his supposedly reincarnated soul mate, but this time he never ditches the rags. This is where the image of The Mummy skulking around in full uniform is born, finally becoming his own thing (even if actor Tom Tyler plays him like Karloff’s Frankenstein with a bum leg).

Once Universal found a mummy they could market in Kharis, the rest of the sequels can only work to boost his stats to match the more formidable figures of Dracula, Frankenstein, and newcomer hotshot The Wolf Man. 1942’s The Mummy’s Tomb further legitimizes The Mummy by dressing up Lon Chaney, Jr. in the make-up for an otherwise pointless sequel, which is essential to the brand (see also: Son of Dracula, The Ghost of Frankenstein, and the many appearances of Lawrence Talbot, a.k.a. The Wolf Man). Then, it proceeds to delegitimize the Mummy by further developing him into a blurry photocopy of Frankenstein’s monster; Kharis giveth, Kharis taketh away. Not only does Kharis start to carry around his unconscious, reincarnated loves with the exact posture of Karloff’s Frankenstein, but he’s also brought to a fiery end by an angry mob at the film’s climax, directly alluding to James Whale’s visual iconography. 1944’s The Mummy’s Ghost continues that work by finally giving Kharis an official Bride of Mummy counterpart, complete with the white streaks of hair at the temples in the unmistakable style of Elsa Lanchester. At this point in the series, the perils of reckless archeology are no longer a concern. Once Kharis reaches American soil in Tomb & Ghost, the series fixates on red-blooded American men protecting their women from the corrupting forces of seductive foreigners. The most impressive thing about Ghost is that it commits to the bit in a shocker ending, finally allowing The Mummy to successfully steal away his reincarnated love, sinking into the swamp with her dangling in his arms as her body rapidly ages to close their centuries-scale age gap in mere seconds.

There’s some incredibly shameless runtime padding in The Mummy’s Tomb, starting off an hour-long sequel with over ten minutes of “Previously on . . .” recapping before setting The Mummy loose on American soil.  It’s an instructive reminder that these sequels were produced before the invention of home video and, subsequently, VHS rental stores. Since audiences couldn’t easily rewatch a classic movie on a whim, the studios would just remake that same movie again and again to scratch that itch, as a matter of routine. The later Mummy sequels have no interest in being their own thing; they just take the same old Mummy out for a walk. Even the choice to relocate Kharis to Cajun swamp country in 1944’s The Mummy’s Curse affords the series little novelty outside the amusement of hearing Old Hollywood’s goofy misinterpretations of the Cajun-French accent. The Mummy started as Egyptian Dracula in his first outing. Then, he gradually, improbably became New England Frankenstein. For his last trick, he emerges as Cajun Swamp Thing. He’s a true international playboy, seducing a new woman at each stop along the way, including a choice to leave The Bride of Mummy behind here in favor of a new The Mummy’s Princess love interest (future Folgers Coffee spokeswoman Virginia Christie, who looks incredibly hip here with some Bettie Page bangs). Even the novelty of seeing The Mummy trudge along in a swampy locale isn’t especially distinct to this famous monster, though, considering that Lon Chaney, Jr. had already appeared there in the previous year’s Son of Dracula (under the hilarious pseudonym Count Alucard). That’s not even getting into the obvious concerns of what would happen if you dragged your dried-out mummy through a humid swamp. The whole enterprise is one big afterthought.

Of course, the final indignity for all of Universal’s Famous Monsters is to officially sanction Lou Costello’s buffoonery, which The Mummy was tasked to do in 1955’s Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy. It’s here that the Mummy, forever following in Frankenstein & Dracula’s footsteps, has finally Made It. Even so, he’s way late to the party, taking his turn with the comedy duo after they already met Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll & Mister Hyde, and “The Killer, Boris Karloff” in similarly titled comedies. Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy was the very last of the comedians’ onscreen run-ins with Universal’s Famous Monsters, as it also marked the end of their overall contract with Universal Pictures. There are a few stray laughs scattered throughout the picture—mostly catering to fans of “mummy”/”mommy” puns—but the bit had very obviously been exhausted before The Mummy’s number was called, and it feels like just as much of a tired exercise as proper Mummy sequels like The Mummy’s Curse. None of the later Mummy films are especially great, but they are all mercifully short, and by the time you meet up with anyone for the sixth or seventh time they start to become your friend, so it’s fun to see him goof around in this final outing. It’s just that The Mummy is more like your work friend, whereas Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Wolf Man are true buds you look forward to seeing on the weekend.

Like most horror franchises that stumble past their obvious expiration date, The Mummy’s initial outing is a great film in its own right, and its numerous, goofy follow-ups are only made endearing by their familiarity and nostalgic value. There’s nothing iconic about The Mummy’s lore, really. His tana-leaves medicine regimen, crime-scene contaminating mold, and smoky flashback pool have all been forgotten to time, as opposed to other Universal-specific details like Dracula’s hypnotic hand gestures or the bolts on Frankenstein’s neck. The Famous Monsters roster would feel thin & incomplete without him, but he’s mostly a background player. The biggest claim to modern fame for The Mummy is that its 1999 remake is by far the most success Universal has had in its attempts to revitalize its Famous Monsters brand for new generations. It succeeded where fellow studio titles like Renfield, Van Helsing, and Dracula Untold have failed. Even so, that accomplishment only further cements the original Mummy in a B-List status. When someone references the movie The Mummy in conversation, most people immediately picture Brendan Fraser, not Boris Karloff. The audience who remembers any of the Kharis titles in the series—Hand, Tomb, Ghost, Curse—is shrinking every year, despite that version of the monster being the one that appears on all of the throwback posters & Funko Pop boxes. Meanwhile, cinematic references to Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man immediately conjure the likeness of Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Lon Chaney, Jr., which is what makes them official Famous Monster A-Listers. Everyone else is just lucky to be on the guest list.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Save the Green Planet! (2003)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the alien-invasion conspiracy comedy Save the Green Planet! (2003), recently remade by Yorgos Lanthimos.

00:00 Freaky Fridays at Double Trouble
09:33 Starchaser (1985)
14:15 Child of Peach (1987)
20:24 Nothing But Trouble (1991)
25:01 Linda Linda Linda (2005)
34:31 Him (2025)
38:28 The Smashing Machine (2025)
45:56 Animation Mixtape (2025)
50:22 One Battle After Another (2025)
56:45 Move Ya Body (2025)
1:00:24 Butthole Surfers – The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt (2025)
1:04:52 We Are Pat (2025)

1:10:40 Save the Green Planet! (2003)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Video Diary of a Lost Girl (2012)

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It never pays off to be the first person to do something. Lindsay Denniberg’s 2012 feature debut Video Diary of a Lost Girl is a prescient collection of everything that’s hip & trending in genre filmmaking circles right now: VHS tapes as fetish-object collectibles, the burgeoning nostalgia for shot-on-video slasher textures, the black-box theatricality of Grace Glowicki’s Gothic horror throwback Dead Lover, the green-screen psychedelia of Vera Drew’s copyright-testing personal essay The People’s Joker, etc. If Video Diary of a Lost Girl were currently making the theatrical rounds in our new warped-VHS genre nerd dystopia, it would be humming with film nerd buzz, and Denniberg would be enjoying the same kind of Extremely Online microcelebrity of current cult directors like Matt Farley, Amanda Kramer, and Jennifer Reeder. Hopefully, its recent Blu-ray release through AGFA will help correct that oversight, as Denniberg’s time is very much now, after spending a decade tapping her foot in the horror schlock waiting room.

Pris McEver stars as the relatively young, immortal succubus Louise, self-named after the silent movie star Louise Brooks (who also inspired the name of Denniberg’s production company, Pandora’s Talk Box). Louise first saw the Old Hollywood star of the original Diary of a Lost Girl in the initial 1929 theatrical run for Pandora’s Box, when she was first starting out as a succubus and a cinephile. Nearly a century later, her cinephilia has continued through her slacker job as a VHS rental clerk, and her supernatural function as a succubus has continued through her routine acts of rape revenge. In this movie’s lore, all succubi are descendants of the Biblical figure Lilith, and they need to kill once a month by fucking a man to death in order to prevent bleeding out in the “unending bloodshed” of a lethal menstruation cycle. Louise has no drive to kill, really, but she does get horny and does want to keep on living (if not only to make time to watch more vintage horror movies), so she targets the neverending supply of street rapists who seemingly lurk in every alley between her job & home. The trouble is that she eventually falls in love with a boy she genuinely wants to fuck without hurting, and he may be the very same lover she first fell for and lost in her early silent cinema days, reincarnated.

At its heart, Video Diary of a Lost Girl is a supernatural romcom that just happens to be decorated with classic horror references. Not only is Louise’s apartment wallpapered with posters for cinematic provocations like Liquid Sky, American Psycho, and Anatomy of Hell, but she also spends most of her time on the clock watching public-domain horror classics like Carnival of Souls, Nosferatu, and Night of the Living Dead instead of, you know, actually working. Stylistically, Denniberg splits the difference between the German Expressionist fantasia of old and the straight-to-Tubi horror schlock of now. The whole thing is gloriously, grotesquely cheap, playing like what might happen if Annie Sprinkle directed a vampire movie. Every surface is bathed in blacklight fluorescents. Onscreen menstruate glows like red-glitter TV static. All exterior spaces are set in a greenscreen version of Stephen Sayaidan’s Dr. Caligari sets. Characters often sit around doing nothing in particular while the soundtrack is overpowered by spooky goth bedroom pop. It’s all just an excuse to watch video store occultists surf the channels of public-domain horror relics and scrambled-cable porno while, against all odds, falling in love.

Within the opening few seconds of psychedelic video-art color swirls and tongue-in-cheek gratuitous nudity, audiences should know whether Video Diary of a Lost Girl is a friend or foe to their sensibilities. There are plenty of buzzy, hip counterculture touchstones of recent years that indicate the movie has a sizeable cult audience waiting out there, though, however dormant. The problem is that those touchstones didn’t yet exist in 2012, so Denniberg was essentially shouting into the digital void. That’s a common story for underground filmmakers & outsider artists, most of whom don’t get this kind of decade-late victory lap, no matter how deserved.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #248: The Hidden (1987) & Parasites

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Welcome to Episode #248 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of creature features about body-invading parasites, starting with the sci-fi action horror The Hidden (1987), starring Kyle MacLachlan.

0:00 Spooky season
06:16 The Long Walk (2025)
12:12 Robert Altman
16:46 Queens of Drama (2025)

21:07 The Hidden (1987)
36:20 The Tingler (1959)
52:23 Brain Damage (1988)
1:04:15 PussyCake (2021)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Halloween Streaming Report 2025

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Halloween is rapidly approaching, which means many cinephiles & genre nerds out there are currently planning to cram in as many scary movies as we can over the next month. In that spirit, here’s a horror movie recommendation for every day in October from the Swampflix crew. Each title was positively reviewed on the blog or podcast in the past year and is currently available on a substantial streaming service. Hopefully this helps anyone looking to add some titles to their annual horror binge. Happy hauntings!

Oct 1: Presence (2025)

“Presence leans into the improbability of the found footage horror genre by strapping its GoPro to a ghost, so you don’t question why the camera continues rolling; you only question why it’s choosing to observe what we see (and to ignore what we don’t). The answer to that question gave me a goosebumpy shock and made me want to immediately rewatch in the way the best ghost stories do.” Currently streaming on Hulu

Oct 2: The Shrouds (2025)

“Grief has been the major theme of horror cinema for the past decade, while Conspiracy has been the major theme of mainstream political thought. Only Cronenberg could find a way to eroticize both in a single picture. The king of the perverts continues his reign, despite his reluctance to wear the crown.” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel

Oct 3: The Rule of Jenny Pen (2025)

“John Lithgow is always at his best when he’s playing inhuman villain, which in this case involves him performing a Punch & Judy puppet show that went so far off-script it became elder abuse.” Currently streaming on Shudder

Oct 4: Cure (1997)

“A little skeptical of why so many movie nerds are willing to give into the pure-evil vibes of vintage Japanese horrors like this, Suicide Club, and Perfect Blue but get hung up on the plot incoherence of their modern American equivalent in Longlegs. Doesn’t really matter though; all are self-evidently great.” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel

Oct 5: The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020)

“This is a fun little horror comedy (with occasional heaving helpings of drama) with a talented cast and good inspiration. There are elements of Jaws at play here as the police force finds itself under intense scrutiny and pressure in order to make sure that the town doesn’t miss out on its annual cash injection from ski tourism. There’s great ambiguity throughout about whether there really is a werewolf in Snow Hollow or if there’s a seven-foot serial killer using folklore and superstition to cover for their compulsions. There’s some fun misdirection throughout, as it at first seems that the connection between the victims has something to do with the elementary school that they attended, but this is either a subplot that was dropped or it’s an intentional red herring, and I’d say that the scaffolding of the story is otherwise solid enough that I’d vote it’s the latter.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime

Oct 6: Sinners (2025)

“A truly American horror story: a beer & blues-fueled gangsters vs ghouls battle set against endless fields of cotton and all the commodified evil they represent. Funny & sexy too, improbably.” Currently streaming on HBO Max

Oct 7: Day of the Dead (1985)

“A brains vs brawn showdown in an underground military bunker just below the surface of an ongoing zombie apocalypse.  Hard to buy a premise in which scientists working towards a solution for an infectious illness that could wipe out the entire planet’s population have their research derailed by meathead fascists who don’t care to understand the value of the work.  Not really sure what Romero was on about there.” Currently streaming on Shudder, Peacock, and for free (with a library card) on Kanopy

Oct 8: 28 Weeks Later (2007)

“The uselessness of the U.S. Army in a peacekeeping role seems clearly inspired by the handling of the so-called ‘War on Terror’ in which the States were actively involved, and the choice of a stadium as an evacuation area and the overreaction of armed authority to refugees and evacuees is evocative of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. That doesn’t stop the film’s treatment of the military from being a little “hoo-rah” in certain places, with Scarlet acting as the reasonable authority figure and Doyle evacuating survivors despite orders to kill on site, playing into tropes about good soldiers vs. morally questionable generals. Still, their ability to protect the citizens within seems doomed to failure from the start, based on the ease with which a couple of teenagers managed to slip out of the quarantine zone, so the criticism of the industrial complex holds.” Currently streaming on Hulu & Shudder

Oct 9: 28 Years Later (2025)

“It’s almost unfathomable to think that the rest of the world could simply move on from locking down multiple nations and washing their hands of the whole situation while consigning the people living there to almost certain eventual violent death at the hands of sprinting, infected undead. But then again, we’re kind of living in that world, aren’t we?” Currently streaming on Netflix

Oct 10: Tomie (1998)

“A perfect example of an understated horror film that, despite being an adaptation of a longer, serialized work, functions as a singular text unto itself. Nakamura’s Tsukiko is a character who should be more widely recognized as an archetypical, textbook-perfect final girl. I appreciated the attention to detail that a woman with amnesia might find herself drawn to photography, perhaps the most documentarian method of artistic expression, as an art form, even if she’s not very good at it.” Currently streaming on Shudder and AMC+

Oct 11: Audition (1999)

“I love how the perspective and basic reality of the ending doesn’t fit into any one tidy interpretation. A shame that the wave of American torture porn that followed didn’t pick up on that note and instead just echoed the gore” Currently streaming on Shudder and for free (with a library card) on Kanopy

Oct 12: Carrie (1976)

“One of the core texts of the Puberty as Monstrous Transformation canon, with especially thunderous echoes in titles like Ginger Snaps, Teeth, and Raw. This is the first time I’ve watched it that made me both cry (when Carrie is enjoying herself at the prom) and jump out of my seat (when Carrie’s hand reaches out from the rubble of her home). It’s so self-evidently great on its own terms that it’s easy to forget that it’s also a great De Palma film . . . until he starts splitting the screen and importing notes from the Psycho score. That’s our guy.” Currently streaming on MGM+ and AMC+

Oct 13: The Rage – Carrie 2 (1999)

“I haven’t wanted to see shitheel teens die in a movie this badly since, well, since I rewatched Carrie a few weeks ago . . . Except their deaths felt like an actual victory this time instead of just small & sad.” Currently streaming on MGM+

Oct 14: Companion (2025)

“It’s no surprise that this is advertised by association with producer Zach Creggers’s previous film Barbarian, as there’s a lot of fun being had by mixing an inconsistent light tone with a genuinely tense horror atmosphere, bending what could otherwise be pretty straightforward genre fare into something novel.” Currently streaming on HBO Max

Oct 15: The Ugly Stepsister (2025)

“A gnarly body-horror revision of the Cinderella story, now about the madness induced by the never-ending scam of self-improvement through cosmetics. Sometimes “changing your outside to match your insides” isn’t the best idea, not if you’re willing to allow your insides to become monstrous in the process.” Currently streaming on Shudder

Oct 16: The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014)

“Shameless ‘Aren’t old people scary?’ exploitation, but super effective nonetheless.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and Shudder

Oct 17: Communion (1989)

“The problem with casting Christopher Walken in your alien-encounter horror is that nothing you dream up could possibly be a convincingly alien as Christopher Walken. Full honesty, though, the first alien contact scene is 100% accurate to an uncanny experience I had in New Mexico about a decade ago, which is an embarrassing thing to say about a movie that’s otherwise so aggressively goofy.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime, Kanopy, and for free (with a library card) on Hoopla

Oct 18: Tesis (1996)

“Often feels like the made-for-TV version of Red Rooms in its aesthetics, but it’s effectively eerie nonetheless. Does a great job playing with home-video audiences’ attraction/repulsion relationship with extremely violent images (and hetero women’s attraction/repulsion relationship with violent men), even if its own academic interest in the subject is self-admittedly superficial ” Currently streaming on Shudder & AMC+

Oct 19: Fade to Black (1980)

“An uncomfortably prescient film about how everyone with a Letterboxd account is an antisocial degenerate.” Currently streaming on Shudder and for free (with a library card) on Hoopla

Oct 20: Deadline (1980)

“Canuxploitation meta-horror that puts itself on trial during the tax shelter era, belligerently presenting academic arguments that horror allows artists to process societal ills through metaphor while frequently interrupting itself with vignettes of low-brow, for-their-own-sake gore gags of dubious artistic merit. Just about as narratively flimsy as Lucio Fulci’s Cat in the Brain, and just about as unpredictably entertaining too.” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 21: The Tomb of Ligeia (1964)

“I didn’t expect to be expressing this, but this is easily the equal of Masque of the Red Death. Whereas Masque drew its production value from its elaborate sets and huge crowds of revelers, Corman knew what he had on his hands when he got the opportunity to film Ligeia at Castle Acre Priory, some of the best-preserved monastic ruins following the dissolution of most monasteries in the 1500s by Henry VIII. As a shooting location, this place lends this an immediate sense of gravitas. There are no in-studio “moors” full of machined fog and spindly little trees here, but a real, tangible sense of something manmade being reclaimed by nature, something historical but decayed.” Currently streaming on MGM+ and for free (with a library card) on Hoopla

Oct 22: Nosferatu (2024)

“Wouldst thou like to live maliciously? It’s becoming apparent that Eggers has softened his alienating approach to narrative structure so that he can escalate his exquisite, traditionalist images to a larger studio-budget scale. As a result, this doesn’t add much to the ongoing ritual of restaging Dracula (except for accidentally making the argument that Coppola’s version is the best to date). It’s a gorgeous, heinous nightmare in pure visual terms, though, which obviously goes a long way.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime

Oct 23: Alucarda (1977)

“A Satanic blood orgy between Carmilla, Carrie, The Devils, and The Exorcist, staged entirely on leftover sets from Kate Bush music videos. Impossible not to oversell it” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel

Oct 24: Burial Ground (1981)

“So much care went into creating a wide range of gnarly latex zombie masks for this that it’s hilarious they left so many of the performers’ hands fleshy and relatively in-tact. It looks like they’ve never worked a day in their undead zombie lives.” Currently streaming for free (with a library card) on Hoopla

Oct 25: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

“More like The Texas Sledgehammer Massacre amirite? Honestly, this probably wouldn’t rank in my top 5 Tobe Hooper movies, since I’m more of an 80s splatstick guy than a 70s grindhouse guy, but I do respect that it is the 70s grindhouse movie: the one that everything in its wake has sweatily scrambled to emulate.” Currently streaming on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Peacock, Screambox, and for free (with ads) on Pluto TV

Oct 26: Final Destination Bloodlines (2025)

“All the things that you want from a Final Destination movie are present: a harrowing opening scene, a bunch of people being snuffed out via Death’s contrived coincidences, an appearance from Tony Todd to explain the rules, a last-minute aversion of death that lulls the remaining survivors into a false sense of security, and a mean ending. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Currently streaming on HBO Max

Oct 27: Dead Talents Society (2025)

“Last year, this wonderful influencer-era update to Beetlejuice earned gradual acclaim & notoriety on the festival circuit only to be dumped on Netflix with no fanfare to speak of long after the word of mouth had cooled. Meanwhile, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice got the red-carpet festival premiere treatment at Venice before immediately cashing in on easy nostalgia money across every multiplex screen in America, despite not being half as charming or inspired. ‘I hate this world’ indeed” Currently streaming on Netflix

Oct 28: Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster (1964)

“There’s just no way around it; King Ghidorah is the most heavy metal monster design of all time. Loudly & proudly metal as fuck on a cellular level. It’s so metal that it takes three other skyscraper monsters to muscle him out of the pit, one for each lightning-spewing head 🤘” Currently streaming on HBO and The Criterion Channel

Oct 29: Ash (2025)

“The overall societal decline in attention span has resulted in a lot of discourse about whether a certain scene has a ‘purpose’ or a ‘point,’ meaning to what end does it serve the god of plot and the god of plot alone. Those people are not going to have a good time screening Ash. But the fact that I liked this one so much despite its real lack of theme or thesis tells me that this is a movie with no small amount of things to enjoy and even praise. Its ‘purpose’ is to be an Alien movie unapologetically shot like Knife+Heart; its ‘point’ is to synthesize all of those elements together and then create the best sci-fi synth soundtrack since Blade Runner.” Currently streaming on Shudder and AMC+

Oct 30: Junk Head (2017)

“If this stop-motion nightmare comedy were made a decade or so earlier, it could’ve sold so many Hot Topic t-shirts. The world would’ve had no need for Salad Fingers. We’d be in a much better place.” Currently streaming for free (with a library card) on Hoopla and Kanopy

Oct 31: Frankie Freako (2024)

“Entirely accurate to the Gremlinsploitation genre it’s spoofing, in that for the first 20 minutes or so I was clawing my eyes out in fear they were never going to get around to setting loose the little monster on the poster. Once Frankie’s fully unleashed, however, it’s time to party. Shabadoo.” Currently streaming on Shudder and AMC+

-The Swampflix Crew

Cross-Promotion: Homicidal (1961) on Bonafide Tastemakers

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Our very own Britnee Lombas & Brandon Ledet recently guested on the Bonafide Tastemakers podcast to discuss how William Castle’s shameless Psycho rip-off Homicidal (1961) compares to its blatant source of inspiration.

Give a listen to the Bonafide Tastemakers episode on Homicidal below! And if you like what you hear, you can follow Bonafide Tastemakers on Instagram for more raucous cult cinema celebration.

-Swampflix

Day of the Dead (1985)

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One of the more exhausting tendencies of zombie outbreak stories is how they all inevitably devolve into large-scale militarism. Even the more modern deviations on vintage zombie tropes in 28 Days Later, Overlord, and The Girl With All the Gifts are largely military stories, as if there is no way to depict a worldwide zombie outbreak without filling the frame with tanks & helicopters. All zombie roads lead directly to the military, and they all trail back to George Romero’s original Living Dead trilogy. Following the suburban invasion of 1968’s Night of the Living Dead and 1978’s trapped-in-a-shopping mall satire Dawn of the Dead, 1985’s Day of the Dead is a pure brains-vs.-brawn showdown in an underground military bunker just below the surface of an ongoing zombie apocalypse. If violent, crowd-controlling military action is essential to zombie outbreak storytelling, then movies might as well make the conflict between that military and the citizens it supposedly protects a central part of the text. Being more of an Idea Guy who was always eager to dig into the moral & philosophical implications of his films’ supernatural events than someone who could convincingly stage propulsive action or heartfelt drama, Romero was perfectly suited to explore that conflict at length, locking the audience into the bunker with him until he could sort it all out.

Lori Cardille stars as a scientist willing to dedicate the rest of her life to researching a cure for zombie blood infection. Unfortunately, she’s the only woman in the underground military bunker that’s been retrofitted into her research lab, and the heavily armed meatheads who provide her rations are getting tired of her work showing no discernible progress. The only thing stopping them from stripping her of her lab equipment (and more) is the parallel research of Dr. Matthew Logan, a mad scientist whose colleagues mockingly refer to as “Frankenstein”. Having long given up on finding a cure, Frankenstein has instead shifted his research to training zombie captives from the mines outside the military base on how to behave. He rigs their undead, semi-disassembled bodies to machines, stimulating them with electricity to see how their flesh might be controlled by the living’s command. He’s also taken one specific zombie as a pet, a specimen who he’s nicknamed “Bub” in loving, disdainful memory of his own father. Thanks to the power of positive reinforcement, Bub can vocalize simple phrases, operate a Walkman, salute the military officers in the room, and (most recklessly on Frankenstein’s end) fire a handgun. He can also apparently hold a grudge, since he eventually escapes containment to hunt down the bunker’s most fascistic militant in retribution for the crime of being an asshole.

There are three clear MVPs at work here, Tom Savini the most obvious among them. The all-out zombie mayhem of the final minutes (when the military base is inevitably invaded by the horde outside) gives Savini and his make-up team dozens of chances to stage and restage the classic Romero gag where a victim is overwhelmed & disemboweled by hungry zombies’ reaching hands. Before that climactic payoff, the frequent visits to Frankenstein’s lab allow Savini more freedom to construct individual animatronic monstrosities that show the mad doctor’s abandoned experiments in various stages of failure & disrepair, and the results rank among the gore wizard’s most unforgettable creations. The unlikely comic duo of Frankenstein (Richard Liberty) & Bub (Sherman Howard) are also obvious MVPs, delivering most of the film’s memorable character moments. The way Frankenstein wanders into meetings with military officials smeared from face to boot in infected zombie blood while explaining why they should pet-train the cannibal ghouls instead of shooting them dead makes for consistently rewarding comic relief. Meanwhile, his star pupil Bub is initially amusing as a slack-jawed walking corpse who can only vaguely mime human behavior while chained to the laboratory wall, but he ends up carrying most of the film’s effective pathos once he breaks free – just like the original Dr. Frankenstein’s pet creature.

Like with most Romero classics, I found the scene-to-scene drama in Day of the Dead to be frustratingly inert but was greatly impressed by its thoughtfulness in theme and tactility in violence. Maybe the main scientist’s heart-to-hearts with her infected boyfriend or the renegade helicopter pilot who could eventually fly her to safety ran a little dry, but the larger dramatic concerns about military muscle overpowering scientific experts after the breakdown of societal decorum felt true and continually relevant. On the film’s 30th Anniversary, it isn’t especially difficult to find contemporary meaning in a story about scientists working towards a solution for an infectious illness that could wipe out the entire planet’s population but having their research derailed by a few gun-toting fascists who don’t care to understand the value of the work. The most Romero stands out as a visual stylist here (outside the opportunities he gives Savini’s crew to run wild in the lab) are during a brief zombie hunt sequence in an underground cave, where he brings back the same extreme red & blue crosslighting he experimented with in 1982’s Creepshow. Otherwise, his artistry is most deeply felt in the philosophical nature of his writing, which finds a way to interrogate the inherent militarism of zombie narratives instead of casually accepting it as a matter of course.

-Brandon Ledet