October Horror Movie Challenge: A Slumber Party Massacre Double Feature

The grindhouse classic deserves a double feature. So for tonight’s viewing I have queued a double feature of the 1982 The Slumber Party Massacre and its 1987 follow up, Slumber Party Massacre II. They are good examples of the slasher genre, maybe even some of the best, but I am watching them more to gather ideas for my West End Girls adventure.

The first film has an interesting pedigree. Rita Mae Brown (the author and feminist activist) wrote it, and Amy Holden put it on screen; a slasher flick originally made by women. Fairly progressive for the 1980s. One could be excused for not figuring that out with all the long, lingering shots of naked young ladies on display. Brown's screenplay was meant as a parody of the genre, but Roger Corman, the producer, had other ideas and wanted a straight horror movie. The result is a film that falls between those two poles. I mean, Corman has a reputation to live up to. Though I would have liked to have seen Brown's original treatment, Sleepless Nights, before it got "Cormanized."

The Slumber Party Massacre (1982)

The premise is as simple as it gets. Trish, a high schooler (though we do hear she is 18), throws a slumber party while her parents are away. And there is Russ Thorn, an escaped murderer, making his way through the neighborhood with a huge power drill. 

I will leave you to imagine the rest. Don't tax yourself; you'll do more work than the movie does.

Ok. So, in practice, the movie is better than it sounds. It is quicker than your average early eighties slasher and has a good deal of humor. The girls are convincing as friends and not just a roster of victims biding their time. It has some self-awareness without tipping into full parody. Then there's the drill as a weapon, hardly subtle.

It has all the worst of the genre too, the nudity and the voyeurism, which makes the fact that Brown and Jones were behind it all the more of an oddity. They do not so much subvert the formula as work within it, giving the exploitation market what it wants while having a word or two with its assumptions.

You will see some familiar faces in the cast. Robin Stille is Valerie, Debra De Liso is Kim, and Brinke Stevens is one of the party guests. Stille, in particular, would make a name for herself as a scream queen in films like Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, which, oddly enough is not on my list of movies to watch.

Valerie is one of the better characters. For most of the running time, she stays away from the main party, but when the killing starts, she becomes much more central. I like that the girls are not left to wait for rescue.

It is a cheap, at times ridiculous movie, very much of its era, but also efficient. Russ Thorn is an escaped killer with a drill, no need for any complicated mythology. The peril is in how fast a night out with a group of ordinary girls can become a nightmare. That is why it works.

Slumber Party Massacre II (1987)

By the time the sequel comes around five years later, subtlety is seen as unnecessary. This movie was also unnecessary, but here we are. We also lost the "The" somewhere. 

Valerie’s younger sister Courtney Bates is now a teenager and still reeling from what befell her sister. She has nightmares of a rockabilly type in leather who has an electric guitar with a huge drill on it.

Yes, it is what it is.

Crystal Bernard (before her run on Wings) plays Courtney (replacing Jennifer Meyers from the first film), and Deborah Brock wrote and directed. The film takes the original concept and heads straight for A Nightmare on Elm Street country, muddling dreams, trauma, and reality until you can hardly tell where one ends and the next begins. Atanas Ilitch is the Driller Killer, and he is nothing like Russ Thorn. He will sing, dance, and put the boot in to Courtney like someone who's part rockabilly frontman, part Freddy Krueger, and has been given a guitar of no practical use whatsoever.

It is all rather absurd. I cannot say it is good, but it is memorable enough.

Courtney is what makes it work. The trauma has not left her even if she was spared the first movie’s events by dint of her sister. Her friends dismiss her visions as nightmares until the impossible shows up. In that way, the sequel is less an exercise in the escaped-murderer genre and more about the dread of something from your past coming back for you.

The Los Angeles Times made the same observation in their review of the day, drawing a line to the Nightmare on Elm Street movies and asking whether Courtney is seeing things or in the grip of a hallucination. I find that more useful than the guitar drill.

Jackson Connections and West End Girls

I get some mileage out of both these films for my West End Girls adventure, if not quite what they set out to give.

From the first I take the closeness of young women in a space where they ought to be secure. It matters, since I have no wish for the victims in West End Girls to be just another name on Edwin Harrow's (my slasher) tally. They are college freshmen with their friends and routines, their jokes and summer plans and the odd complaint. Some share a room; others share a wardrobe. There is always one studying while the rest want to go out.

When the killings come, the ordinariness of it before then only heightens the intrusion.

The Slumber Party Massacre gets this right on its own. The girls go about their business, and the horror comes anyway.

Slumber Party Massacre II offers a different thing: the reiteration of trauma. That is nearer to the supernatural heart of West End Girls. What happens in 1985 is not some other killer emulating Edwin Harrow. It is the same horror from 50 years ago.

Edwin was fixated on Marian Ashcroft and Clara Deane, but his anger reached out to other freshman women he though were laughing at him. From May 25 to 30, 1935 the original murders ran their course. Marian lived to tell of it, some did not.

Now history haunts the present.

I want the adventure to read as a haunting in a slasher's outfit. At first, the characters spot the usual: a girl alone at night, a tail, a body left on the emptying campus. All the signs of a slasher-killer.

Then it does not add up. A man is seen in clothes from another era. A victim says she can hear music from 1935. A dorm room seems older for a moment. One has a dream of a stranger and finds her picture in the yearbook.

The past isn't recalled so much as attempted again.

These two movies make that clear to me. The Slumber Party Massacre has the social world of the young women. Slumber Party Massacre II suggests that one can survive a horror and still not be free of it; trauma can become something of a supernatural affair.

The trick with West End Girls is to put those together and keep the women as people and not mere victims. 

Edwin had no such qualms, viewing them as objects for his resentment. The adventure must do better.

October Horror Movie Challenge 2026
Viewed: 35
First Time Views: 23

October Horror Movie Challenge: A Sorority House Double Feature

Heading into the homestretch here, and I like doing more double features. Just like being at the old 67 Drive-in! For tonight’s double feature I am going back to my college days with a pair of slashers set in sorority houses, namely 1982’s The House on Sorority Row and the 1986's Sorority House Massacre.

They are not subtle films by any means; honestly, they are just excuses to have college girls run around in various stages of undress, but both have ideas I can get behind, especially for my own West End Girls adventure for Jackson.

The House on Sorority Row (1982)

Mark Rosman directs this one, with Kate McNeil as Katey and Eileen Davidson as Vicki, and Janis Ward, Robin Meloy, Harley Jane Kozak, Jodi Draigie, and Ellen Dorsher playing the rest of the sorority. The film opens on seven sisters getting ready for graduation under the thumb of their house mother, the imperious Mrs. Slater. When a mean-spirited prank turns deadly and appears to have killed her, the girls put the body out of sight so the graduation party can go ahead.

Then someone starts killing them off.

What makes it a better-than-average early-eighties slasher is that there is more to it than a killer in a room full of young women. The crisis is of the girls’ own making. They do something terrible, then panic and compound the problem in an effort to cover it up. The murders have some consequence to them instead of being random. In trying to hold onto the secret and the party, they only open themselves up to more trouble. It is a trope I have seen many times, but it works.

There is history to the house as well, which gains in importance over the course of the movie. It is not just the apparent death of Mrs. Slater that is the horror, but the older secret tied to the place and its inhabitants. That is what holds my interest. A sorority house is a location with memory, not just where the characters reside. By the final act, the girls are not being made to pay for a prank so much as having come across a story that was underway long before they got there. Very effective horror.

This movie is also a great example of the Generational Horror that I really want to achieve in Jackson. The sins of the past are not necessarily revisited by the younger generation, but most often it is the younger generation that has to pick up the bill. This one also has that empty college campus I am looking for in West End Girls.

Sorority House Massacre (1986)

Four years on we have another bunch of college women in a house with a past. Beth comes to the sorority following the passing of the aunt who brought her up and at once has nightmares and déjà vu about the building. At the same time, Bobby, a murderer in a mental institution, feels that she is back at the house and gets out.

Beth/Laura is a psych major, but she also has a lot of visions and/or memories. Could be both given the bad psychology in this one. But it's a horror movie and not my PSYCH 212 lecture I used to give. 

He has his reasons. Bobby is Beth's brother. He killed the rest of the family some years back and went after her too. She lived and was raised somewhere else, repressing the memory to the point where she does not know the sorority is her old home. Yeah. We have seen this plot device as well.

Then, of course, all the girls stay the night in the house he killed everyone in.

Carol Frank wrote and directed the film for Roger Corman's New Concorde. Having done The Slumber Party Massacre with Amy Holden Jones, Frank's hand is evident. One can also see Halloween all over it. Bobby is your typical escaped killer coming home to put things right and Beth has her psychic warnings and dreams. I find the psychic side of it the most compelling. Beth has no conscious recollection of Bobby. Her mind does, however. She will have dreams of the murders before she can put any meaning to them. The house is what brings back the memories she has put away, and Bobby in some fashion is aware of her from miles off.

Once more, the building has the memory before the person. In that way, the sorority house is something more than mere scenery. It is almost a character in its own right.

West End Girls

These two films have me thinking about West End Girls right away.

The setting for that one is set during Memorial Day week in 1985 by which time the students at Illinois Beecher and MacAlister Colleges have for the most part vacated their dorms. A nearly deserted campus is what makes it work. The buildings are there, and the few students left are in them, but the college’s ordinary social life has run its course. It is not unlike the sorority houses in the other movies, only you do not need a sorority for it. The women’s dorms turn into isolated communities where all are privy to each other's routines, yet there are not many witnesses on hand should anything come to pass.

Then there is the buried history.

With The House on Sorority Row, the violence is set off when present day students let an old family secret tied to the house get in the way of them. In Sorority House Massacre, Beth goes back to the scene of her family’s murder without really knowing she is doing so.

West End Girls covers the same ground, if on a bigger scale. I still need to detail more of the adventure, but it is based on a rumor that used to float around my hometown. In some ways this is the Ur-Adventure of Jackson.  Some fifty years back, Edwin Harrow killed five freshman women and Clara Deane in an attempt on Marian Ashcroft. The colleges did their part to cover up the truth, putting Edwin down as one of the victims instead of the killer.

In 1985, that kind of violence starts to happen again.

It is the notion I find with these college slashers. From a student’s vantage point, the place is transitory; you live there for a while, get a degree, and leave. The building endures and with it the stories.

The girls in West End Girls are not targeted because they were unwise or went into the wrong house. They have come to a spot where something awful was done and never properly put to rest. There is a difference. They are living in the wrong place and it is up to the player characters to stop it.

Edwin is not just another slasher after college girls. He is what remains of a wound the institutions refused to acknowledge, half a century ago. It lends the piece more of a ghost-story air than your average slasher, even though I want it to start like one.

Again. If I am waxing political in the adventure, well, no one lives in a vacuum. 

The opening death(s) should be of a type we are very familiar with. A young woman by herself in a largely vacant dorm at night. A figure at the end of the hall. A door that ought to have been locked.

After that, the PCs try to find out that the pattern predates them, and the adventure takes a turn. This isn't a slasher movie. This is a ghost story.

For the most part, the girls in these two films are hemmed in by someone else’s secret. With West End Girls, my girls will try to get to the bottom of it and put an end to the role history has for them. That is how they are not like the ones Edwin put to death long ago.

The old tale has five young women dying. But not the West End Girls.

October Horror Movie Challenge 2026
Viewed: 33
First Time Views: 21

October Movie Challenge: Poltergeist II & III (1986, 1988)

 I wanted to do these two movies back-to-back since they are more connected to each other than they are to the first movie. The original Poltergeist is not just a great horror movie; it is a great movie, full stop. Spielberg shows the promise here that will earn him the accolades he gets with ET and Shindler's list. 

Sadly, Poltergeist directors Brian Gibson (II) and Gary Sherman (III) don't quite live up to the bar Spielberg set, but then again, who can? But if you ignore the first movie and take these two on their own merits...well, they still don't live up, but there is a perfectly serviceable horror movie here.

Niether of these re first time views.

Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986)

"They're baaack."

I can't say with 100% certainty that the title of this movie didn't have a roundabout way of influencing the name of this blog. The name of my blog comes from an older website of mine, which in turn came from a newspaper column about weirdness I used to write for my high school newspaper. Though I am pretty sure I started that in 1985. In any case, the movie and the blog both take their name from the same sources.

In another bizarre connection. I guess I connection I used to talk to my dead grandmother on my play telephone too. But in my defense, I was only 2 at the time. 

The Freeling family has moved from their haunted house, now a hole in the ground, to live with Diane's mother. Missing and unexplained is older daughter Dana. The script for the movie has her at college, but that sequence was cut from the final shooting script due to the murder of Dominique Dunne, the actress who had played Dana. I have to admit that bothered me a lot at the time.

A dig at the former site of their home reveals a burial pit under the graveyard already there. Yes, it is an extra graveyard! BUT this becomes the key feature of this and the next film, introducing Rev. Henry Kane (played by Julian Beck), one of the creepiest horror movie villains in a long time. So the movie is redeemed by this alone.

We get a Magical Native American, Taylor (Will Sampson), to help the Freelings against Kane. This would be the last film roles for both Sampson and Beck.

What follows is fairly predictable, but not unenjoyable. This film has an uphill battle afterall. There are some great special effects. The "Worm" stands out, but the "Spielberginess" of the movie is gone.

Poltergeist III (1988)

In some ways, I enjoyed this one more. This movie only has Carlo Anne (a sadly very sick Heather O'Rourke) and Zelda Rubinstein as Tangina Barrons, as in the previous two movies. Henry Kane is back, played by Nathan Davis, with voice-overs by Corey Burton. The setting switches to Chicago, a place I was already in love with, so there was that.

Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams are out as the Freeling parents as Carold Anne is sent to live with her aunt Patricia (Nancy Allen) and her new husband, Bruce (Tom Skerritt). I like both Nancy Allen and Tom Skerritt, so I was fine with this, and if the plot contrivance was to send Carol Anne to a special school, well that is fine, though I did have concerns about parents sending their child away after two traumatic experiences.  

We do learn from Tangina that there have been no incidents since the last movie and they only start now because Carol Anne's psychiatrist, Dr. Seaton (Richard Fire) dredges it all up again via hypnosis. 

This movie also features an early outing for Lara Flynn Boyle as Bruce's teenage daughter Donna Gardner. 

This moves the action from haunted houses built over graveyards to the modern John Hancock Center in Chicago. A good example of my "Horror Comes Home" theme. 

The Poltergeist Tragedies

I do at least want to acknowledge the various deaths that took place. Dominique Dunne was just 22 when she was murdered by her ex-boyfriend in 1982. Her death really bothered me at the time. Later on, both Will Sampson and Julian Beck would die soon after the second movie, and of course the most famous was Heather O'Rourke, age 12, who died in February of 1988 after filming, but before the movie was released in June.

Poltergeist 2015

I wanted to watch the 2015 Poltergeist with Sam Rockwell, but honestly I am a bit tired now. This was a lot easier to do 15 years ago.

NIGHT SHIFT and Jackson Connections

Both NIGHT SHIFT and Jackson, IL can draw on ideas from both Poltergeist II and III, though for different things. And honestly this is why I picked these two for tonight even though I have already seen them both.

With Poltergeist II it is the notion that one can get away from the supernatural and not have escaped it for good. The Freelings in Cuesta Verde have left town to put their lives back together, doing as much as anyone would in their position to leave it all behind. It does not keep Reverend Kane from putting in an appearance. I think of this with Jackson. Put down a haunting, and you are not guaranteed a clean ending. Some things have a memory of those who hurt them, some places hold on to former residents, and a family can be tied to something that will follow them anywhere.

I want room in NIGHT SHIFT for such stories. A bunch of characters can put an end to an artifact or a terrible encounter and go home to finish school and grow up. But come five or ten years, and something happens that makes them realize the experience has left its mark. They thought the matter was settled years ago, but then they have to consider they may never have understood what went on. In Poltergeist II at least, getting out alive and leaving something in your past are not the same.

Poltergeist III is in some respects more interesting to work with. The move to Chicago alters the whole mood. Carol Anne is older and with relatives in a high-rise. The supernatural is to be found in the elevators and mirrors and parking garages rather than another suburban house. That is along the lines of what I have in mind for my Chicago 1992 campaign.

By 1992, the Jackson kids have put some distance between themselves and their former home. They are at college or at work, sharing an apartment, having relationships, and paying bills. They have obligations and have let some of their old friends go. This is significant because in Jackson they had a support system. If something odd happened, there were people around who knew what it was, and even if the adults didn’t believe them, they had each other.

In Chicago, none of that applies. Old friends are hundreds of miles off, and no one at work or in college has any idea what transpired in Jackson. It is hard to tell someone who has never seen anything supernatural why you are afraid of a certain sound or reflection. The characters are more capable, but their support system is gone.

The city also puts the horror in a different light. In Jackson, I see it in the woods or an abandoned house outside of town. Chicago has its share of forgotten spots, but there is something about having the supernatural in the heart of a crowded city. An apartment building can have hundreds of people who don’t know one another. You might hear screaming through the wall and be told to mind your own business. The elevator could stop on a floor where a tenant is not remembered. There is a reflection in an empty hallway. You can be in the company of others all day and find nobody to put stock in what is happening to you.

That is the horror I am after in Chicago 1992.

There is a contrast too between the supernatural and the demands of being an adult. As a teen, a haunting might mean missing school or lying to your parents. At twenty-two, you still have to be at work in the morning, and the landlord wants his rent. Your classes do not stand down because you saw a dead woman in the lift, and your partner may well think you are losing it for not looking in the bathroom mirror. Those pressures put a different spin on the story. The characters have more freedom but also responsibilities they cannot shirk.

And that is how Jackson and Chicago differ. In Jackson, the kids are coming to realize that the world is stranger and more perilous than the adults say. They are young enough to hope an older head has the answers. By the time we get to Chicago 1992, they are the adults. They have to make the calls and make sure everyone is alright when things go sideways. There is no parent or teacher standing by with the solution.

Poltergeist III stays with me for that reason. I have no desire to rework Reverend Kane, the film’s mirror tricks, or Carol Anne’s tale. I want to see what happens when the supernatural tags along from childhood into adulthood.

The Jackson kids have made their way and put down new roots. But the trouble they ran into back home may have done the same.

Now I am in the mood to do a Chicago-based horror movie marathon. I bet there are enough movies. According to IMDb, there are 152 movies tagged "Horror" and "Chicago, Illinois." I might have next year's theme! Though I do want to do psychic movies sometime as well.

October Horror Movie Challenge 2026
Viewed: 31
First Time Views: 19

October Movie Challenge: Eternal Evil / The Blue Man (1985)

 I would be remiss if I didn't watch some more psychic-phenomena movies. And Eternal Evil, aka The Blue Man, lets me dip into some Astral Projection and Reincarnation. I just wish it had been a little better. 

Eternal Evil / The Blue Man (1985)

Paul Sharpe is a successful director of television commercials living in Montreal with his wife and son. He has a nice house, a good job, and what appears to be a comfortable life. He is also deeply dissatisfied with all of it. He is married and has a kid.

Paul becomes involved with a mysterious woman named Janus, played by Karen Black, who teaches him how to leave his body through astral projection. At first, the experience seems liberating. Paul can travel outside himself, move invisibly through the world, and escape the ordinary life he finds so frustrating.

Then people around him begin dying.

There is a lot happening here, and it looks like Paul is doing the killing, but instead, it is our psychic vampires who are preying on others to take over their bodies. 

I like some of these ideas, and Karen Black is always fun, but it just wasn't put together in an interesting way. I wanted psychics and astral projection, and I got all that, including some psychic vampires. I should have been happier, but mostly I was a little bored. 

October Horror Movie Challenge 2026
Viewed: 29
First Time Views: 19

October Horror Movie Challenge: Hold the Dark (2018)

Tonight I am stepping outside my usual range for this year’s challenge. This one was my wife's choice because she likes werewolves and Alexander Skarsgård. 

Most of what I have been watching has been from 1984 to 1987, but as I was watching, I began to think about something specifically for my Valhalla, Alaska, setting. It has wolves, isolation, strange local beliefs, and the tournaq, or tornrak, wolf-demon.

Hold the Dark seemed like a good choice for all of this.

Hold the Dark (2018)

Medora Slone (Riley Keough), a young mother from the Alaskan backwater of Keelut, puts in a call to wolf expert and naturalist Russell Core (Jeffrey Wright), with an urgent request. Her six-year-old Bailey is gone, and with two other children having vanished in much the same way, she believes wolves are to blame. She wants him to come up north and put down the animal before her husband Vernon (Alexander Skarsgård) comes home from his tour in Iraq.

Core makes the trip thinking it will be a hard but straightforward job. He is relieved of that notion rather quickly. What he uncovers about Bailey is far worse than Medora let on, and when Vernon does return, he sets off on a course of violence all his own. In time, the film sheds its missing-child premise for something stranger and harder to pin down.

You could almost, but not quite, call it a werewolf movie or even a supernatural horror in the conventional sense, yet for most of its running time it leaves you in doubt as to whether it might be one. I find that uncertainty to be its best quality.

Take the wolves themselves. They are present from the start, though the film is cagey in how it presents them. Core will study them and insist they are animals, not moral agents; he can make sense of a pack culling its own young as a matter of nature, which is violent but not evil. The villagers of Keelut have a different take. Once Core gets to the bottom of what happened to Bailey, some are quick to say Medora is under the influence of a wolf-demon, or tournaq as the movie puts it.

You will not get a tidy resolution on that here. There is no scene of Medora breaking out in fur, nor does Vernon undergo a full-moon metamorphosis. No one is on hand with an old tome to lay out the rules. The wolf imagery is there in the hunting and predation, in parents turning on their children, and in people acting on instincts others cannot fathom. Whether you see it as supernatural or merely human is left open, and that is more to my liking than a run-of-the-mill creature feature.

Then there is the village of Keelut, perhaps the most effective horror element of all. It feels cut off from the world, not by some contrived fantasy setting but because the distance imposes its own order. An outsider like Core will notice right away: the people know each other, and they know things they are not sharing with him. The landscape is vast, cold, and indifferent. It is exactly what I was looking for in this movie. Alaska is a character in and of itself, it was one of the reasons I began Valhalla, AK.

Director Jeremy Saulnier and writer Macon Blair seem to have an eye for dark fantasy rather than for Alaskan realism. As someone considering an Alaska setting for inspiration, I can put that aside. Hold the Dark is not a documentary, but it is invaluable for atmosphere. The silence and the sense that the modern world thins out once you are far enough from the centers of population are very well done. There is something about the cold, the dark, and the isolation that keeps ideas like Valhalla, AK alive for me.

The masks in the film do this well. Vernon and Medora both wear them, and the movie leaves us wondering what they mean. Ritual, identity, a change in the person beneath without any physical alteration. That could serve Valhalla nicely. A wolf-demon need not make a man into a werewolf; the mask is transformation enough. Wear it and your thinking changes. You stop feeling the cold; you smell blood and recognize fear. There comes a point where you can no longer fathom why the rest of the world is so put off by your actions. That's a different sort of creature.

Violence Without Explanation

What makes Hold the Dark violent is its suddenness and brutality. You have an extended gun battle at one point that could be mistaken for something from another film, yet it serves to make a point: here, violence is hard to put a lid on once it starts. Saulnier has a way of rendering it ugly instead of heroic, and this story requires that. Vernon is as dangerous as they come but never an action hero; he is unsettling because his conduct follows a logic that eludes everyone else. Medora is no different. They are both driven by something older and more instinctive than what we would call morality. Whether one wants to call it supernatural is beside the point. For Core, it might as well be. My wife kept thinking they were werewolves. I don't think she was wrong.

Valhalla, AK and the Tournaq

My Valhalla is quirkier than Keelut, somewhere nearer Northern Exposure and Resident Alien, where the oddities and monsters are local complications rather than an unending tragedy. But humor only goes so far. You need places where the jokes end. Put some miles between you and town, lose the road and the radio, and you will hear wolves. Then you are in another place entirely.

I went to see the movie for the wolf-demon. The film refers to its possible wolf-spirit as a tournaq, but I would not put much stock in that as a mythological artifact. Inuit lore has its share of helping spirits for the shaman or the hunter, but "wolf-demon" is the film’s own construct.

If I were to put Valhalla on paper, I would fictionalize it. Let us say the locals use the term tornrak for it, though no one can tell you where the word originates. An anthropologist will say the name is incorrect, and an old-timer will reply, "Yeah. So is the thing." That is the sort of place Valhalla is.

The beast is not a werewolf in the sense of a man becoming a wolf. A tornrak is what gets people to become wolves in every way but the physical. It latches on to someone who is already isolated or angry. At first it is just a presence at the periphery of vision, a wolf at the window with no tracks in the snow to account for it. Then there are the dreams of hunting and running with blood in the mouth and snow on bare feet. When the person wakes, he feels better than he has in years. One should not overlook that. A proper supernatural corruption gives you something before it takes anything: strength, a release from guilt or fear, the means to endure the cold. Before long the victim is thinking in pack terms. Family is pack, outsiders are to be put down, and instinct has done away with moral choices.

And then the tornrak wants something. Hunger does not require words.

Final Thoughts

There is a strangeness to Hold the Dark. It sets out as a mystery over children being killed by wolves and devolves into a crime thriller of the most violent kind, all while skirting the edge of the supernatural without fully committing. You could be left frustrated by the ambiguity and the questions the film has no intention of answering. Even the director and writer seem content to let the atmosphere be dark and mythic rather than literal. To my mind, that is precisely what makes it such good material to draw from.

I don't want the tornrak explained. I do not want somebody to find a nineteenth-century book saying it has 8 Hit Dice and can only be killed by silver. At least not at first. I want people in Valhalla to disagree about whether it even exists. I want the old locals to tell contradictory stories. I want the rational explanation to remain possible long after the players have stopped believing it.

And I want the wolves to remain wolves. 

Because the most disturbing possibility in "Hold the Dark" is not that human beings can turn into animals. It is that maybe there is not as much difference between humans and animals as we would like to believe.

October Horror Movie Challenge 2026
Viewed: 28
First Time Views: 18

October Movie Challenge: Frankenstein (2025) and The Bride (2026)

Another double header tonight. With the disappointment of Dracula 2025 still on my mind (damn, that movie got on my nerves!) I wanted to see something Christoph Waltz was good in.

There have been many versions of Frankenstein on the silver screen, including one of the very first films ever made. This movie did not come out in time for me to review it last year, so I saved it for this year. Now, while this is the first time I have reviewed this, I did watch it back in November. So I really can't count tonight's re-watch as a first-time view.

Frankenstein suffers the same issues as Dracula, in that the novel is rarely portrayed with fidelity on the silver screen, and what most people think of as the story has a lot more to do with the Universal Studios versions from the 1930s and 1940s. That's fine; those movies are classics for a reason, but they are not the story on the page.

Frankenstein (2025)

Guillermo del Toro’s 2025 take is not 100% faithful to the novel, but it comes very, very close. I am inclined to rank this and Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as the two best efforts to put Shelley's story on screen. It has occurred to me that a Frankenstein marathon is in order at some point.

Oscar Isaac stars as Victor Frankenstein here, with Jacob Elordi as the Creature. Mia Goth plays both Elizabeth and Victor’s mother, Claire, and Christoph Waltz plays Heinrich Harlander, the arms maker who puts up the money for Victor’s experiments. Harlander is one of del Toro’s more substantial inclusions; he is a wealthy man with his own reasons for wanting to make inroads on death. He is not part of the novel, but that is fine, really.

Waltz is good, as you would expect. He does not have to resort to rants or chewing scenery to make his mark. In Harlander, he has a chance to be charming and intelligent while also being deeply unsettling and vaguely amusing. One gets the sense right away that he is not bankrolling Victor out of any particular faith in the progress of science.

Where del Toro makes his biggest change is with Victor. The original is obsessive and irresponsible enough, but del Toro takes his arrogance and cruelty a step further. Isaac’s version is brilliant and driven, yet damaged by his father and the loss of his mother, and he seems to think that gives him license for all he does. There is an ego to the project as much as a desire to vanquish death.

Which leaves Jacob Elordi’s Creature as the film’s emotional core. Elordi is excellent in the part. What you see at first is something almost childlike, taking in the world through imitation and sensation. But he grows into a creation that is articulate and self-aware, as Shelley intended. Film versions have a habit of losing that; they make the monster out to be stupid when he should be reasoning, reading, and fully comprehending what Victor has made of him.

Del Toro seems to grasp that the real tragedy is not the accidental making of a monster, but rather that Victor has made a person and then shirks his responsibility for him. That is the heart of the novel and why the adaptation works for me.

You will find the Arctic framing device intact, with the narrative set against Captain Anderson’s expedition in the frozen north. It is not exactly as Shelley wrote it, but it has more of the structure and spirit than the typical fare of lightning and torch-wielding villagers.

Then there are the visuals. From the laboratories and machinery to the costumes and bodies, it is all gorgeous, with the kind of beauty mixed with decay that del Toro excels at. Victor’s work is impressive but grotesque.

It is a horror story, to be sure, but not the Creature who is the monster. Victor is. Or at least he creates the conditions for disaster and acts as if it were done to him. The Creature is capable of terrible things, but there is more to it than that.

I was fond of the movie when I saw it in November and even more so the second time around. Being aware of where del Toro has departed from Shelley allows one to see the purpose behind it. It is not a perfect adaptation; perhaps we never will get one. But this one knows the novel, and that is worth something.

The Bride! (2026)

 Ok. I want to start out by saying I really loved what this movie was trying to do. I am not 100% sure it always succeeded in doing what it wanted. No worries; the best bits overwhelmed the weaker parts.

This one doesn't fit my theme either, but like last night it was my wife's choice. She sits through these with me, and I have to sit through things like Hot Frosty around Christmas. ETA: I have been informed I will be watching "Christmas at the Zoo" sometime next month.

This movie opens with narration by Mary Shelley. That is quite appropriate, really, and a nice callback to the very original Bride of Frankenstein, and even a little bit of Young Frankenstein. Much like Elsa Lanchester, Jessie Buckley plays both Mary Shelley and the Bride. She also plays Ida, the woman who is reanimated into the Bride. Christian Bale, in his usual chameleon-like display, plays Frankenstein's monster. It was directed and written by Maggie Gyllenhaal. 

Mary Shelley provides the opening narration for The Bride! which is a fitting touch, and in its own way a nice nod to the original Bride of Frankenstein where we were treated to Mary, Percy and Lord Byron talking shop over her story. Jessie Buckley is on hand as both Mary Shelley and the Bride. In fact, she appears as three related people: Shelley, Ida, and the resurrected woman who will be the Bride. Christian Bale is in fine chameleon form as Frank, or what you would now call the monster, while Maggie Gyllenhaal has put her stamp on the project as writer and director.

The premise is simple enough. Take the old mythology of Bride of Frankenstein and put it in 1930s Chicago. Frank is in need of company, and he goes to Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening) to have a creature created for him. They happen upon Ida, a young woman who was murdered by a mobster, brought back to life. 

Gyllenhaal poses the obvious question with this: what if the Bride had a movie of her own? What if she were allowed to determine her own identity? In so doing, she makes this less of a straight adaptation and more of a rejoinder to the whole Frankenstein tradition.

Buckley is outstanding. She is not grateful to be put back together, nor will she take it for granted that Frank is her soulmate by virtue of having made her. Her Bride is damaged and sexual, funny and angry, unpredictable and very much alive in spite of herself. She has strong opinions on the matter.

As for Bale’s Frank, you can see the line of descent from Boris Karloff’s Monster far more clearly than in Jacob Elordi’s Creature. He is a lonely, scarred man, weary of being hunted, and the film is well aware that he is carrying decades of cinematic history on his shoulders.

Then there is the setting. 1930s Chicago brings with it a host of gangsters, the press, radical politics, and a city in flux for these two outsiders. The synopsis touts a combustible romance and a cultural movement, and in a way the film is as excessive as that description implies. It can be a weakness at times, but also a strength.

There are scenes where The Bride! seems to be straining to be a Gothic horror, a gangster film, a screwball romance, and a feminist take on Frankenstein all at once. Not every bit of it lands. But I would prefer to see Gyllenhaal go after something with such ambition rather than another serviceable retelling of the monster making for a windmill.

Buckley is what keeps it all in order. She gives the part an identity of its own, quite unlike Lanchester’s character, and that is the point. James Whale gave the Creature a companion when he asked for one; Gyllenhaal wants to know what that companion has to say about it. As it happens, quite a lot.

I like the notion of Buckley playing Mary Shelley too, alongside Ida and the Bride. It draws a line between the author and the women made and remade by others. After Hollywood has been at it for two centuries with their versions of Frankenstein, it is only right the Bride should push back. A clever idea.

Hollywood has "dug up" and remade Mary Shelley so many times. 

Don’t get me wrong, not everything in the movie works. The tonal changes are sudden, and at points the characters have to make room for the film’s arguments. I would have liked to have seen it let Frank and the Bride just be for a while. 

But when it does work, it is very good. And it is not trying to usurp the original Bride of Frankenstein, which would be a fool’s errand. It is having an argument with it. Far more compelling.

A case of two Frankensteins

It was a happy accident to put these on one after the other; in doing so, you see how they handle the same mythology from opposite ends.

Then there is Guillermo del Toro, who has no trouble going backward. He makes a point of returning to Mary Shelley and the Arctic setting, giving the Creature the intelligence and emotional depth he is due. It is a reminder that the tragedy is Victor's for not owning up to the life he has made.

Maggie Gyllenhaal moves in the other direction. She is concerned with a movie invention, not something from Shelley, and wants to know what transpires once the laboratory is left behind. What if the Bride is not done for? What if she has her own wants and is under no compulsion to love the one who put her together?

One film is about what Frankenstein was, the other about its potential. I have an appreciation for both. Coming off Dracula 2025, it is a relief to be with filmmakers who actually care why these old monsters are worth our time. Gyllenhaal and del Toro, even in their different takes, respect their source material much more than Luc Besson. 

Mary Shelly, Feminism and Horror

Of course, before there was Boris Karloff, before there was the Universal monster, and long before Hollywood decided that every Frankenstein story needed a castle full of electrical equipment, there was Mary Shelley. In the summer of 1816, an eighteen-year-old Mary Godwin joined Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori in Lake Geneva, Switzerland, where a challenge to write ghost stories ultimately gave us Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Published in 1818, the novel has never really left us.

What I find remarkable is not simply that Shelley was a young woman writing horror in the early nineteenth century, though that is remarkable enough. It is that she understood something about horror that we are still exploring today. The frightening part of Frankenstein isn't merely the reanimated flesh or the unnatural creation of life. It is what happens when someone creates a living being and refuses to take responsibility for it. Victor Frankenstein's greatest sin is not necessarily that he creates a monster or even his hubris, but that he abandons his creation and then refuses to face the consequences.

It is also worth remembering that some of the foundational works of horror were written by women. Mary Shelley helped establish the traditions of both Gothic horror and science fiction, long before those genres acquired their modern names. She wrote about death, obsession, murder, unnatural creation, and the destruction of families, and she did so without sacrificing the emotional and philosophical questions that make the story endure. More than two hundred years later, we are still finding new ways to tell her story. That is a legacy few writers, regardless of genre, can claim.

The Bride of Mary Shelley

There is another connection between Shelley's original novel and both versions of The Bride of Frankenstein that I find especially interesting. In the novel, Victor begins creating a female companion for his Creature but ultimately destroys her before she can come to life. He fears what she might do, whether she would accept the Creature, and what might happen if the two could reproduce. In James Whale's 1935 film, the Bride comes to life, but things don't work out as her creators intended. She takes one look at the Creature and wants nothing to do with him.

There is something wonderfully tragic about that moment. Both Victor and the Creature imagine a female companion who will fulfill their expectations, but neither has considered that she might have expectations of her own. The film gives her very little screen time and even less opportunity to express herself, but her rejection of the Creature becomes the emotional climax of the story. A woman created to be someone's companion chooses otherwise, and everything falls apart.

Now jump ahead ninety-one years to Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride! (2026). Here, the Bride is no longer simply a companion created for the Creature. She was a woman named Ida before her death, and when Dr. Euphronius brings her back to life at Frank's request, she becomes something neither of them could have anticipated. She is angry, confused, passionate, violent, and determined to discover who she is. Frank wants someone to love him, and as the two develop a relationship, the Bride is not particularly interested in being defined by his desires. She has her own identity to discover, her own desires, and a whole lot of rage.

What I find fascinating is how the three versions build upon one another. In Shelley's novel, the female Creature is denied existence because Victor fears what she might become. In Whale's film, she appears only briefly, but she is allowed to reject the role assigned to her. In Gyllenhaal's film, she finally becomes the central character, and she is every bit as monstrous, complicated, and unpredictable as the men around her. She isn't a perfect heroine, nor does the film ask us to excuse everything she does. She is a monster, after all. But she is also a person, and that is an important distinction. She is a monster of her own choosing.

I also love the casting connections. Elsa Lanchester plays both Mary Shelley in the opening of the 1935 film and the Bride herself. Gyllenhaal takes that idea even further by having Jessie Buckley play Mary Shelley, Ida, and the Bride, with Shelley's restless spirit becoming part of the story itself. Whether you like Gyllenhaal's interpretation or not (and I do), that is a clever way to connect the author to her creation. The woman who wrote the original story is quite literally demanding to be heard through the woman the story has so often left silent.

And perhaps that is what I find most interesting about these films. The horror isn't simply that someone has brought the dead back to life. It is that these creations have their own thoughts, feelings, desires, and wills. The people responsible for creating them seem genuinely surprised when they don't behave as expected.

Mary Shelley was exploring these questions in 1818, and here we are in 2026, still finding new things to say about them. I think that speaks rather well of her original idea.

All from a teenage girl who was challenged to write about monsters.  

Or as Mary says in the 1935 Bride of Frankenstein. "Why shouldn't I write of monsters?"

NIGHT SHIFT and Jackson Connections

I am not sure where the kind of mad science we see in Frankenstein would find a home in Jackson. The Mauvaiseterre has more than its share of witches, psychics, demons, and ghosts without anyone building from spare parts.

The premise, however, is right at home there. All it takes is a death and someone who will not let it stand. In Jackson, any effort to reverse it would be of a magical order: a parent stumbles upon an antiquated rite, a witch makes an exception to the rules for raising the dead, or a psychic is certain the lost one is within reach.

Perhaps it succeeds. That is when the horror sets in. Not from any malice in the returned, but because death has altered them in ways no one comprehends. You could make that work anywhere. The spectacle is in the making of life; the story is in having to answer for it.

I mean. That is what I have done with Elowen Hale, but chronologically speaking, she isn't born until 2005 or so. So that is still 20 years in the future as far as my Jackson is concerned. 

October Horror Movie Challenge 2026
Viewed: 27
First Time Views: 17

October Movie Challenge: Monster Marathon

It's the weekend, and that means double feature time. Though I am likely to hit more double features snce I still have a lot of movies I want to watch. I wanted to get some movies that could have some monsters I could use in Jackson, Sunny Valley, or even Valhalla and I wanted to stay within my time period. So tonight I decided on a mini monster marathon with two movies I have tried to watch before and never managed to finish.

That probably should have been a warning. Still, I am nothing if not stubborn or a glutton for punishment.

Tonight’s movies are Blood Tide (1982) and Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues (1985). Both feature monsters lurking in isolated places. Both have some potentially interesting ideas. Both are also fairly terrible.

But I finished them this time. That has to count for something at least.

Blood Tide (1982)

I will start with the better of the two, though that is not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Blood Tide (and sometimes "Bloodtide" in the same credits) follows Neil (Martin Kove, "Karate Kid" and "Cobra Kai") and Sherry Grice (Mary Louise Weller, "Animal House"), an American couple who travel to a remote Greek island searching for Neil’s missing sister Madeline (Deborah Shelton). They eventually find her living there with Frye, an American treasure hunter played by James Earl Jones. Frye has been exploring underwater ruins around the island and, because treasure hunters in horror movies apparently have no sense of self-preservation, uses explosives to open a sealed underwater chamber.

Something had been sealed inside. The local villagers knew this, because of course they did.

Soon young women are disappearing, an ancient sea creature is loose again, and the villagers return to traditions involving human sacrifice in an effort to appease it.

There is a decent monster movie buried somewhere in here, but hell if I can find it. 

The cast alone should have helped. James Earl Jones, José Ferrer, Martin Kove, Lydia Cornell, and Mary Louise Weller. It's a surprising cast, and they really should have produced something better.

James Earl Jones does what he can with Frye, and José Ferrer could probably make a grocery list sound important, but there is definitely a sense that everyone showed up, collected a paycheck, and enjoyed the Greek scenery. To be fair, the scenery is gorgeous.

The movie itself has the right elements. We have a remote Greek island, an old convent, pre-Christian artwork, underwater ruins, a sealed chamber, a monster that once required human sacrifices, and villagers who remember more than they are willing to say. This should be fantastic material for an old-school monster story.

Instead, the movie is slow, the creature is barely developed (both in plot and in makeup effects), and much of the suspense never really goes anywhere.

I do like the central idea. Frye discovers that some things were sealed away for a reason. The image of an underwater chamber marked with an ancient symbol is exactly the kind of thing I want from this sort of movie. Madeline’s strange connection to the island also suggests something older and more interesting than the movie ultimately develops.

There is also something almost charmingly old-fashioned about *Blood Tide*. This feels much more like a 1970s horror movie than something from the early 1980s. The Americans travel to an isolated Old World location, ignore local warnings, disturb an ancient evil, and discover that the locals have preserved traditions for reasons outsiders do not understand.

In the end, the scariest thing about this movie is the full-on kiss that brother and sister Neil and Madeline share. 

Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues (1985)

Then there is Boggy Creek II, which I feel I should point out is the third Boggy Creek movie.

Charles B. Pierce wrote, produced, directed, and stars in this sequel to his much better 1972 film The Legend of Boggy Creek. Pierce plays Dr. Brian Lockhart, an anthropology professor at the University of Arkansas who takes several students into the Arkansas wilderness to investigate reports of a Bigfoot-like creature living around Boggy Creek.

I mean, there are a lot of reasons why this movie should tick all the boxes.  Cryptozoology professor. College students. Remote Arkansas swamps. A local monster legend. Early 1980s technology (loved the computer!), colorful (yeah, that's word I am going with) locals. 

You could build a perfectly good NIGHT SHIFT adventure out of that setup in about five minutes.

And somehow this movie is remarkably dull. Sometimes painfully so. 

Lockhart and his students head into the woods with camping equipment and a sonar-based detection system while Lockhart narrates previous encounters with the creature. These stories appear as flashbacks and involve farmers, fishermen, stranded motorists, and one unfortunate man in an outhouse. Eventually the group meets Old Man Crenshaw, who knows considerably more about the creature than he initially admits.

It turns out Crenshaw has captured a young creature, which explains why the adult has become more aggressive. Lockhart eventually realizes that the monster is not some rampaging beast. It is a parent trying to recover its child.

That is actually a decent idea. The monster is not evil. The humans caused the problem.

Unfortunately, getting to that realization takes much longer than the movie’s 91-minute runtime.

Maybe it because it goes from dull flashback to dull flashback. Or maybe because we get Professor Lockhart confidently explaining everything while his students follow him around. The professor is also astonishingly self-assured for a man whose research methodology seems to consist primarily of driving into the woods and waiting for Bigfoot to appear. I suppose tenure was easier to get in the 1980s.

And will someone PLEASE get Chuck Pierce (yes, his son) a goddamn shirt?

Monsters Where They Are

My intended theme for this October was 1980s horror. But the theme I found has been "Horror Comes Home."  I picked these movies because they matched my intended theme and completely failed on my found theme. These movies are more akin to the 1970s style of horror, going where the monsters are. Often in some remote location, be that the Arkansas backwaters or Greek islands. 

I have likely given these movies far more thought than they deserve.

October Horror Movie Challenge 2026
Viewed: 25
First Time Views: 16

October Movie Challenge: The Initiation (1984)

Tonight’s movie is The Initiation, a 1984 slasher featuring college students, sorority pledges, buried family secrets, recurring nightmares, and a late-night trip to a department store that goes very badly.

This one has been on my list for a bit now. Despite the title, there really is not all that much initiation going on here.

The Initiation (1984)

Kelly Fairchild, played by Daphne Zuniga in her first major role, is in the midst of pledging a sorority but is also haunted by a recurring dream in which her parents and a stranger are being set on fire at her old home. With large holes in her memory of the event, she enlists the help of Peter (a pre-Charmed James Read), a psychology graduate student, in the hope a sleep study will jog things loose.

On the other hand, Kelly and the rest of the pledges have their work cut out for them in preparation for the big night. They are to make off with the night watchman’s uniform from the department store her family owns. It is a convenient way to get a bunch of students locked up in a sizeable commercial building after hours, which I do not mind. When the killer shows up, the matter of the initiation becomes secondary.

Larry Stewart has directed this from a Charles Pratt Jr. script. Along with Zuniga, you will see Vera Miles, Clu Gulager, James Read, and Marilyn Kagan in it. Some of the campus footage was done at Southern Methodist University, and the Dallas Market Center was used for the Fairchild store. Ignore the fact that the sign out front is just a banner draped over the real mall's sign. 

Zuniga is very good in what was her first major part. She has to be the anchor of the film as Kelly and, later, as the murderous twin, Terry Randall. The whole evil-twin business is straight melodrama, but she makes the difference between the two convincing enough for me to accept it. 

Then there is James Read as Peter. He is fine in the role, though these days I am more accustomed to him as Victor Bennett, the father on Charmed. There is something oddly fitting about the future dad of Prue and the girls delving into psychic dreams in an eighties horror.

College Horror 

I have to say the college atmosphere is what I enjoy most, even if the film could have made better use of it. There is a different dynamic to college horror than to high school horror. In high school, you are still tied to your family and the identity you have had since you were young. College is meant to be a chance to put that behind you, to leave home and figure out who you are going to be as an adult. I have brought this up with both college and boarding school movies this month and it is a fertile ground for a game.

So Kelly can't recall anything from her life before the age of 9. Which is convenient since there are plenty of red herrings here that make you believe she might be our killer. 

As Kelly is put through the motions of a ritual to induct her into a new social family, she is also starting to realize that her own flesh and blood are not what they seem. One could make the case for a better film that would have done more with such a parallel, but what is on offer here is sufficient to draw an audience to the multiplex.

The Mall After Dark

This is where The Initiation becomes a far more compelling affair. Even if it doesn't differ much from Chopping Mall in some respects. 

For the sorority challenge, Kelly and the rest of the pledges are tasked with going into the Fairchild department store after it closes. Some students slip in to put the frights on them, and before long all of them are trapped. The well-lit world of commerce is transformed into a slasher’s maze.

Using the Dallas Market Center as a stand-in gives the movie a scale you do not get from an average house or dorm setting. Malls and the like are fine horror territory precisely because an empty one is an entirely different place. I have already argued that malls are the second-best place for 80s horror, next to schools.

In the day, they are designed to put you at ease so you will part with your money; there is music, displays to catch the eye, and people about. But when the doors are locked, the mannequins, mirrors, and furniture are still there, and the people are not. The film makes good use of it. It is something I see in a lot of 1980s horror this month: the modern commercial world can be as haunted a castle as any isolated Gothic spot. You head to the mall, and the monster is already there. Or, more to the point, it follows you there.

Jackson finds this useful for Lincoln Square Mall. By day it is all very ordinary. Teenagers are shopping, parents are grumbling about the cost, kids are congregating at the food court, and Stephanie likely knows half the staff. Put out the lights and bar the doors and it is another matter altogether.

Family Secrets

Kelly’s nightmares turn out to be repressed memories. The man she recalls being burned is Jason Randall, her biological father, which means the tale her family has been telling is mostly lies.

But the real twist is yet to come.

There is a twin sister. If you want to say that in your best "Return of the Jedi" Darth Vader voice that is up to you. 

Terry Randall has been put away in an institution since she was a child and expunged from the family record. Daphne Zuniga is on hand to play both parts for us, delivering the kind of amnesia and secret parentage you would expect from a mix of soap opera and horror. She would later go on to "Melrose Place" so yeah, this is a good turn for her.

It is preposterous. Yet it works, perhaps better than it ought to. It's the 1980s. 

An evil twin is a straightforward notion for horror because it is an assault on identity, not just the body. A killer in a mask is concealing himself; an evil twin can take your place. Your friends will swear they were talking to you; your family will spot you in a place you have never been. You may have an alibi, but witnesses will vouch for having seen your face. That is a more interesting proposition than someone simply running after you with a blade.

The rest of the movie is fairly predictable, though. Terry kills all of Kelly's friends and decides to kill Kelly and take her place. Not sure if she really thought this one out well, but hey, she was crazy.

Jackson, IL Connections

I mentioned already I am a touch disappointed I didn't make Stephanie and Grant Vale twins. In truth, it does work better for Steph to have an older brother she thinks is great, but is also away at UIUC, so he doesn't pop in all the time except when I need him.

But near the end of this movie, I had an idea.

Why not make Stephanie into a forgotten twin? 

I would put this down as a Stephanie adventure. But as always, you sub in your Characters here.

Picture someone with the exact features of Stephanie Wren Vale making an appearance in Jackson. In the beginning, there is no violence to point to a monster, just oddities. A teacher is adamant he had words with her after school; one of the cheerleaders will tell you Stephanie called and was deliberately cruel. Then someone spots her coming out of Lincoln Square Mall, even though she was elsewhere.

Stephanie dismisses it as a joke until someone is actually hurt. The witness has no doubt that Stephanie is responsible, and suddenly she has a very personal problem.

Her first thought is likely to be something quite ordinary. She has a sister. Or at least that is what she comes to believe: that her parents have been keeping the existence of another daughter from her. So she starts to probe. She pokes around in the family records, puts questions to her parents, and reads their every hesitation as proof they are up to something.

"Do I have a sister?"

They say no, but are really cagey about it. Stephanie does not buy it. For a Vale, a family scandal is far more credible than a supernatural duplicate. It is only Larina who will eventually put forward the answer Stephanie is not looking for. What if the girl is not her sister? What if she is a doppelgänger?

That is where the story gets frightening. The copy is not content to simply resemble Stephanie; it is studying her. At first there are errors. A wrong nickname is used, or she is wearing something Stephanie would not touch. It knows the facts but not their significance. An associate of Stephanie’s might notice the smile is right on time but not in the right moment. With each meeting, the copy improves.

The doppelgänger is not so much trying to frame Stephanie as it is practicing. Its aim is to take her place. That is the true danger. Stephanie is adept at managing social spaces and how others view her; the creature turns that identity into a weapon.

For the climax, you want to be inside Lincoln Square Mall after hours. There are mirrors and mannequins and dressing rooms aplenty for the thing to vanish and come back a little more like Stephanie. By the end, Faye and Larina may find themselves confronted by two Stephanies, both claiming the other is the monster. Faye (you characters in your) is the one to sort it out. Not with some spell, but because she knows Stephanie.

In my game this would work because Faye would be a good choice to spot an evil twin. 

Final Thoughts

I would not call The Initiation a great slasher of the decade. It's not even really a great slasher for 1984. The title sets you up for sorority stuff the film doesn't really deliver; the initiation is little more than a way to get everyone into the department store.

Still, there are merits, and I did enjoy the second half. The college environment allows Kelly the freedom to question what her family has told her, and the psychological side means her nightmares are not just foreshadowing for its own sake. Daphne Zuniga handles the double duty well in her first major outing, and James Read makes Peter likable enough to make the investigation bearable.

But my favorite part is the mall. There is nothing like a deserted one at night for 1980s horror. It strips the safety from a familiar place. And then you realize the one on your trail has your face. 

In Jackson’s case, I prefer the doppelgänger to the evil twin trope. One character goes through half the ordeal fearing her parents have kept a sister from her. Then the good news: there is no secret sister. Too bad something else is wearing her face. 

I am going to need more "Evil Twin" movies.

October Horror Movie Challenge 2026
Viewed: 23
First Time Views: 14

October Movie Challenge: The Power (1984)

Ok. I want to start out by saying this is not the movie I thought it was. I wanted a movie that was about psychic powers. This is about a cursed Aztec idol home to a demon.

So. A win? Yeah, it was still fun. At least I can log this as a first-time view. 

I am sure this movie has nothing to do with SNAP! nor being the lyrical Jessie James.

The Power (1984)

A college professor has an old idol containing an evil demon named Destacatyl. Before long, it is in the possession of some Los Angeles high-schoolers who see fit to put it to use at a séance by the cemetery.

The results are what one would anticipate.

It is a well-worn setup, yet I appreciate the cursed-object tale when the object in question is as unremarkable as this one. The idol is small and portable, hardly the sort of thing you would suspect of harboring an ancient demon. In that respect, it is very much a movie of its time.

One does not have to trek to a ruined temple or flout the increasingly urgent warnings of locals to desecrate a tomb. Some fool has already done the work and brought the damn thing home. It is a trend I have been seeing in these films: in the old days you had to hunt down the monster, but in the 1980s the monster comes back in your pocket.

The special effects are low-budget 1980s horror through and through. Some of it is better than others, but there is enough oddity to get by. Honestly, I really liked quite a lot of them. The American Genre Film Archive is fond of calling it a film of stage fog, plot holes, and monster makeup, which is a fair enough way to put it. I would take that as a compliment. Mostly. 

The demon Destacaty’s mythology is really thin, but what the idol does to people is the more compelling matter. It offers power (hey, that's the title!). This is much worse than killing you outright. You get something and then you want more and more. The myths, even the Aztec part, are almost unimportant at this point.

This the sort of movie that could only have thrived in the early VHS years. It is a little rough around the edges, the mythology is sketched in rather than fleshed out, and it never quite settles into being one thing or another, moving from creature effects to possession to teenagers. There is a charm to that. And the cover of the VHS case/movie poster promises a lot more than the movie actually delivers, but that is also fine.

It was not going to measure up to Poltergeist or *The Exorcist*, nor did it need to. A creepy object, a couple of good deaths, and some strange imagery were all it took to get someone to buy the box at the video store.

NIGHT SHIFT and Jackson Connections

I can make this work for NIGHT SHIFT with no trouble at all.

Let us have the Jackson version open with the parents coming back from a trip with an odd figurine. Perhaps from an antique shop, or maybe Morgan Chemical sent someone to Mexico for it. No one gives it a second thought until one of the kids has it over for a sleepover.

A séance is proposed.

Someone should be quick to call it a bad idea.

They will do it anyway.

The trick is to make the object unimpressive. Ugly, cheap, even a bit comical. It should make a real 80s kid think of the cursed idol from The Brady Bunch. If it is reeking of evil, they will leave it be. Then let it do the impossible. A candle is snuffed, a door that was locked swings open, a voice is heard.

That's my hook. 

At this point, what the idol does is incidental. As long as it threatens the characters and scares the players and characters alike. But for NIGHT SHIFT I would have the idol be tempting. Give the user a nudge of psychic ability, some better luck. At a certain point, he is no longer wondering if it is dangerous, but why everyone else is so keen to have it removed. The horror sets in then.

Do not mistake *The Power* for a great film. It is uneven, and the lack of budget shows. The mythology never lives up to its potential. But the core of it is good. An ancient evil is not left to rot under a temple. It is made portable. Someone takes it home and makes use of it. And the effects, even when cheap, are fun. 

You do not have to go seeking out the old evils.  As I have shown all month so far, in the 1980s the horrors come to you.

October Horror Movie Challenge 2026
Viewed: 22
First Time Views: 13

October Horror Movie Challenge: Ænigma (1987)

 Tonight I am heading back to school.

Unfortunately, it is a Lucio Fulci school, so this will probably not end well.  This one has been on my list for a while, but I never got around to watching it. It is *slightly* outside of my range, but 1987 is on my mind right now, and I thought a college-era movie with psychic shenanigans would fit well.

Ænigma (1987)

Kathy (Milijana Zirojevic) is a student at St. Mary’s, an exclusive girls’ boarding school outside Boston. She is lonely, awkward, and the target of a particularly cruel group of classmates. The girls convince Kathy that Fred, the school’s gym instructor, is romantically interested in her. Kathy believes them and meets him for what she thinks is a date. Kathy is excited and happy. 

But it is all a joke.

Her classmates are waiting nearby, and when they reveal themselves, laughing at her humiliation, Kathy panics and runs into the road. She is hit by a car. 

Kathy survives, but only barely. She remains unconscious in a hospital, trapped in a coma while her mother keeps watch over her.  Her doctor, Dr. Robert Anderson (played by Jared Martin from "The Fantastic Journey") kereps an eye on her and can't figure out how a girl who is pretty much brain dead is experiencing emotions. Especially when people at her old school start to die.

Then a new girl arrives at St. Mary’s.

Her name is Eva (Lara Lamberti).

And Kathy has found a way back into the school.

Directed by Lucio Fulci and written by Fulci and Giorgio Mariuzzo, Ænigma was an Italian-Yugoslav production shot in Sarajevo, despite the story being set around Boston. Fulci openly acknowledged Carrie as an influence, describing his film as essentially a version of Carrie split between two characters. 

I can't help but think about Phenomena (1985) from last week.

These movies have given me much to consider when it comes to boarding schools. We had a case in point with the one in Phenomena. It is a staple of Gothic fiction and horror for good reason. A normal high school has its way of emptying out; by a certain hour the hallways are quiet and everyone, teachers and students alike, has made their way back to their parents.

A boarding school does not afford that luxury. Class is over, but the kids stick around.

You cannot leave. Your home is your school, and your neighbors are your classmates. The girl in chemistry who can’t stand you is only three doors down. The teacher you hate may be in the same building. There is no line to be drawn between private life and school life since the institution holds sway over both.

That is what makes St. Mary’s so central to Aenigma. Kathy is not just put upon at school; she is living in the very social environment that has cast her out. There is no safe house for her at 3:30 and her tormentors are always on hand. But once she has the upper hand on Eva, the tables are turned. They can no longer go home. The victim has become part of the edifice, and the school is her hunting ground.

I like that kind of horror. You do not need some contrived reason for why nobody is leaving, as you might in an old Gothic tale where a storm keeps them in the castle. At St. Mary’s you are there because you have class tomorrow.

The Other Girl

Then there is Eva Gordon. She is put in Kathy’s old room following the accident, which ought to have been a warning sign. Before long you see something amiss with her. She acts odd and knows more than she should. Her tie to Kathy is plain to see as the latter’s psychic output at the hospital picks up whenever the supernatural rears its head at the school.

This is where the film holds my interest.

It would be easy to say Kathy is possessing Eva in the demonic tradition but it feels more like a projection. Kathy is still alive, her body in the hospital, her brain working. Yet a piece of her consciousness has left her and gone into Eva.

The movie is not going to offer a rigorous account of the mechanics. Fulci is never helped by having rules imposed on him.

Kathy uses Eva as a physical proxy at St. Mary’s and can share senses or work her will on the environment from afar. Her comatose form is the transmitter and Eva the receiver. In a way she is haunting people without being dead. It blurs the line between "Psychic" and "Magic" very effectively.

Since this is horror and the Carrie influences abound, the deaths begin to pile up. 

Each of Kathy's tormentors dies in a horrible way (the snails and slugs are particularly nasty), with Eva as the common factor in all the deaths; she is nearby. 

The movie is about what I expected it to be, really. It was still a lot of fun, and I rather enjoyed it. It's not great, but also not terrible. It didn't give me anything new, but it didn't disappoint me either. 

Jackson, IL Connections

I don't need a long list of powers or effects for a psychic killer; I just need a good reason. Kathy, or someone like her, provides that. It's interesting in one respect. These movies are about someone coming back for revenge against the people who wronged them; if the person coming back is male, we get a slasher; if they are a woman, it results in psychic powers. 

I have not had any solid ideas for psychics yet in Jackson, though I really should, to be honest. I mean, I have Morgan, but he is not likely to go on a murderous rampage. He would find that sort of emotional outburst to be unbecoming. 

I still have a list of names that don't have NPCs yet. Maybe my psychic killer is there.

October Horror Movie Challenge 2026
Viewed: 21
First Time Views: 12