Halloween '26: Group Photo #29

    I didn’t know I had purchased Tubular Bells when I bought a used record from Goodwill. The LP was hiding inside the other record’s sleeve. That’s kind of creepy when you consider that Mike Oldfield's piano motif was used as the opening and closing theme to 1973’s The Exorcist, a movie about a little girl who also has something hiding inside. 

    1977’s Exorcist II: The Heretic is in the top ten of movie dumpster fires. But how many horror movie sequels get a full documentary 48 years later that gets rave reviews? (See Boorman and the Devil.)

    I believe The Exorcist III contains one of the most effective jump-scares of all time. While watching the scene at first you feel like something's going to happen, and when something does happen, you think Oh. Okay, that was it...     And then the movie drops the hammer. 

    I was in college when The Exorcist III came out. I remember talking about it with my friend Jim. He said, “Money, I got to tell ya, that actor [Brad Dourif] at the end? He didn’t hardy move, and he still scared the s— out of me!” 

    That is some high praise.

    Agreed.

Halloween '26: Group Photo #28

    In all three of Sam Raimi’s original Evil Dead movies, 1981’s The Evil Dead, 1987’s Evil Dead II, and 1992’s Army of Darkness, you will see the director's personal car that his father bought new, a 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88. I fact, this model of car appears in all 16 films that Raimi has directed.

    The Evil Dead DVD has two audio commentaries, one by Bruce Campbell, and the other by Sam Raimi and Producer Rob Tapert. Both are great, really, but I like the Campbell commentary more. It’s like watching the film with a friend who is way funnier and more informed than you. When the Delta 88 appears on screen, Campbell says, “What a piece of junk. Sam loves that car. Watch, he'll call it a classic in his commentary,” anticipating that Sam Raimi will refer to it as a classic on his own commentary track (which Raimi does).

    Today’s LP is AC/DC’s For Those About to Rock (We Salute You) since it was released the same year as the original The Evil Dead. I'm going with the second track “Evil Walks." 

   

    Delta 88s in action. (Picture swiped from Facebook.) I would have liked to have thrown up "Delta 88 Nightmare" by X as the song of the day, but I don't have a physical copy.

Halloween '26: Group Photo #25

    I was surprised to find the soundtracks to 1975's Deep Red and 1977's Suspiria on LP at Half Price Books last January. These are from Cinevox's economical "Ciak" soundtrack line. Ciak is Italian for "clapperboard," hence the jackets' artwork. The music's score was written and performed by the Italian progressive rock group Goblin.

    

    I was also surprised that I hadn't updated my Suspiria media to a Blu-ray. Apparently I'm still rocking the three-disc DVD set from Anchor Bay. I'll have to fix that. But I'm keeping the Bay set. It has the soundtrack on CD.

    The third surprise was find a media press book inside the Suspiria sleeve. There is ten pages of black and white promotional materials including poster artwork, stills from the movie, and ad copy. Maybe the LP was part of the promotion? You never know what you might find inside a used LP. 

    Also, whoever came up with the creepy veiny-heart letter font was a genius. 

Halloween '26: Group Photo #24

    In this movie from 1988, the Black Roses are a  group of demons posing as a heavy metal band. They put on a show at their hometown high school and prove that the protesting PTA was right and that metal music really is evil… umm… what?

    From IMDB’s trivia: "Sir Patrick Stewart said in an interview that when he finished reading the script [for 2015’s Green Room] at his country home in England, it was so terrifying, that he locked up his house, turned on the security system, and poured himself a Scotch.” I’ve said this before. Stewart’s performance is absolutely evil in this movie.

    1988’s Lady in White is an independent film that was directed, produced, written, and scored by Frank LaLoggia. Set in upstate New York in 1962, the film does a great job of giving off a small town Halloween vibe. "The New York Times movie critic Caryn James praised the film stating that: 'Here are the bones of an ordinary ghost story. But the writer and director Frank LaLoggia brings them to life with exceptional vitality... The extended Scarlatti family—warm, funny, so real they make the characters in Moonstruck seem like impostors... Mr. LaLoggia creates an unusual, effective child's-eye-view of a sinister wide world, a restless afterlife, and the comforts of family.’” (Wikipedia).

    2015’s The Blackout’s Daughter is the directorial debut of Osgood Perkins, son of Anthony Perkins (Norman Bates in Psycho). This movie was featured the “Hidden Gems” episode in Shudder’s second season of “Horror Greatest.” 

    Today’s theme is "more movies with colors in the title," and yay!, today is also National Horror Movie Day. I got a halftime marching band show to help with tonight, but I'll find something to watch when I eventually get home.

Halloween '26: Group Photo # 23

    Black Sunday is the directorial debut of the great Mario Bava. Directors Francis Ford Coppola (1992’s Dracula) and Richard Donner (1976’s The Omen) both incorporated recreated scenes from Black Sunday into their films in honor and homage to Bava. Director Tim Burton has stated in interviews that Black Sunday is his favorite horror film.

    AIP renamed Mario Bava's 1963 Italian film Black Sabbath hoping to recreate the success of Black Sunday. Hoping to recreate the crowds that this scary movie was bringing in, the British band Earth renamed themselves Black Sabbath, decided to make scary music, and the rest is heavy metal history.

    Mario Bava basically invented the giallo genre with 1964’s Blood and Black Lace. 

    1971’s Black Belly of the Tarantula is a giallo with quite a few connections to the Bond films. The film features Claudine Auger (Thunderball), Barbara Bach (The Spy Who Loved Me), Barbara Bouchet (1967’s Casino Royale), and Giancarlo Giannini (2006’s Casino Royale and 2008’s Quantum of Solace).

 
    1981’s The Black Cat is a loose interpretation of the short story by Edgar Allen Poe. Spoiler Alert! The cat wins… sorta.

    Today’s theme is Italian movies with black in the title. Why Not? It's National Color Day, and in my world black is a color.

Halloween '26: Group Photo #22

     I’m still quoting Jim Vorel’s article, “The 25 Best Werewolf Movies of All Time”.

 
    2014’s Wolfcop is ranked at #15, "More than anything, you feel a very genuine love for the utter ridiculousness of the premise. It’s a film that people clearly enjoyed the hell out of making, which makes that fun infectious to the viewer."—Jim Vorel
 
    2017’s Another Wolfcop (“Dirtier. Hairier.”) didn’t make the top 25 list, but it’s still low budget fun. A Kevin Smith cameo is always a plus.
 
    2020’s Wolf of Snow Hollow is ranked at #10, "The wry, snappy banter gives the Wolf of Snow Hollow a prickly skin, and the restrained application of FX gives it tension. At just under 80 minutes, that economy is key. It’s not so much that the horror is elevated as controlled." —Jim Vorel
 
    1989’s The Wolf's Hour is a World War II horror novel by Robert R. McCammon. Michael Gallatin is a British secret agent who goes behind German lines to stop a secret weapon from being launched against the Allies. Oh, Gallatin is also a werewolf who can change at will. (Robert R. McCammon also wrote 1991’s Boy’s Life, and for that I will be eternally grateful to him.)

    Today's theme is werewolves and uniforms.

     You can click on the title of the article to read the complete descriptions for each film. 

Halloween '26: Group Photo #21

  I enjoy reading Paste magazine. I had an actual magazine subscription before they went completely online, and I still get their newsletters. They posted the article/ list "The 25 Best Werewolf Movies of All Time" last October, and I wanted to see where some of the movies I own ranked, if at all. 

    All the following quotes were written by Paste staff writer Jim Vorel

The Wolfman in yesterday’s post is ranked #17, “…an absurdly large $150 million budget pushed it into being the marketed as the blockbuster it should have never attempted to be. But you can still do far worse in the werewolf movie canon.”

             Bad Moon in last Sunday’s post about “Final Dogs” is ranked at #9, "Why the filmmakers used any of the atrocious CGI you’ll see in the transformation scene is beyond me, given how spectacular the actual suit looks. Don’t sleep on Bad Moon—it’s the best werewolf movie you’ve never heard of."

            Last Friday's An American Werewolf in London is at #1, and deservedly so, “The film lulls you into comfort with its witticism before springing shocking, gory dream sequences on the viewer, which repeatedly arrive unannounced. The key moment is the protagonist’s incredibly painful, traumatic full transformation, set to the crooning of Sam Cooke doing “Blue Moon,” which is still unsurpassed in the history of the genre. 

            Here’s four more movies from the top 25:

           1974’s The Beast Must Die (on laserdisc) is ranked at #24, "Near the end, this goofy flick even features a 30-second “Werewolf Break,” where the audience is asked to guess the wolf’s identity."

           1943’s Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (on DVD) is ranked at #8, "It can’t stand up against the better entries in the Frankenstein series, or the original Wolf Man, but there’s no substitute for seeing two of the original monster icons go toe-to-toe.” 

           2002’s Dog Soldiers (on DVD) made it to #4, "If someone ever asks me to venture an opinion on the best-looking practical effects/full-body werewolf suits used in a feature-length horror film, the choice of Dog Soldiers will be an easy one to make.”

           1981’s The Howling (on DVD) is up at #3, "1981 happens to be the best year in the history of werewolf cinema, thanks to three films: An American Werewolf in London, The Howling and Wolfen. Of those, The Howling can’t quite compete with the macabre humor and budget of John Landis’ British werewolf classic, but it still ranks among the best lycanthrope movies of all time.”

    You can click on the title of the article to read the complete descriptions for each film. 

Halloween '26: Group Photo #19

     Today's shelf theme is "final dogs*." I'm not even sure if that's a thing.

    In Bad Moon (1995) Thor is a very good boy.   

    In Crawl (2019), Sugar is a very good girl.

    In Good Boy (2025), Indy is a very good boy.

    In The Lost Boys (1987), Nanook is a very good boy.

    *No fictional dogs were harmed in the making of this post.

Halloween '26: Group Photo # 17

    When it comes to horror/comedy, 1981's An American Werewolf in London is a masterclass in both.

  "A naked American man stole my balloons." is one of the best lines of dialogue in cinema.

    Obligatory inclusion of Warren Zevon's album, Excitable Boy, on CD. It contains his only top 40 hit "Werewolves in London". Zevon wrote it in 15 minutes with some friends. I plan to use this album again in another group photo.

    "Will the Wolf Survive?" is a song from 1984 by Los Lobos. In literal terms, in regards to the movie, no, he can't. 

    

    The DVD's insert sports a really popular image for the film.

    I like how the Chicago band, Local H, paid homage to the that picture on one of their Pack up the Cats concert posters. This hangs in my basement. It looks better in person.

Halloween '26: Group Photo #16

  1997’s Mimic was directed by Guillermo del Toro. I was surprised to learn that. I thought the movie was okay when I first saw Mimic back in the day. It's certainly nothing like his other productions that came later. Turns out Miramax had really messed with the final edit, like adding all kinds of secondary unit scenes, and the end result was disowned by the director. Fifteen years later del Toro used the original footage to reassemble the film into something close to what he had envisioned. This is that version: Mimic “The Director’s Cut” on Blu-ray. 

Mimic 2 came out in 2001, and Mimic (3): Sentinel was released in 2003. Both films were direct-to-video productions. Of the two, and neither is great, I think #3 is more interesting. That can happen with B-movie trilogies. The second film tries to be more of the the same, but by the third one the filmmakers feel like they can throw out the rulebook. #3 is basically Rear Window but with giant cockroaches. AND #3 stars Lance Henriksen. AND he’s awesome.

The soundtrack for Mimic was released on Record Store Day in 2022. The LP’s fold-out jacket opens to reveal a giant Judas Breed insect hiding inside. The vinyl is a dirty, dark green, of course.

One of the unintended consequences of organizing these group photos is that it gives me the chance to make some space on my shelves. I’m looking at the DVDs of Mimic 2 and 3 and thinking, Yeah, you were fun to find, but it is time to let the next person have that fun. Into the donation box you go.

Halloween '26: Group Photo #15

Most people had tube TVs (CRTs) in the early days of DVDs. Director Stanley Kubrick didn’t like the way his widescreen movies looked on the 4:3 screen. He thought the black bars on the top and the bottom of the screen were distracting and in widescreen the movie looked too small. His solution was to release his later films on DVD in an open matte aspect to fill the screen. Technically, you were getting more movie because you could see everything the camera filmed, but you wouldn’t get the intended 1.85:1 composition. Ironically, the film has black bars on either side of the screen on today’s TVs.

These DVDs came with a disclaimer on the back cover. It almost reads like an apology, “We know... We know... It's not our fault."

As you’s expect, the Blu-ray corrected this 

It’s well-known that Stephen King hated Kubrick’s film interpretation of The Shining. King tried to correct course with the 1997 TV mini series that he wrote and produced. This version of The Shining closely aligns with his book. I found this DVD at Goodwill last Monday. I bought it to hear the feature-length commentary by King and the crew.

The novel, Doctor Sleep, is the sequel Stephen King wore for his book, The Shining. The screenplay for Doctor Sleep is the sequel King wrote for both the original book and the original movie. For example, The Overlook Hotel burns down at the end of the novel and the miniseries. At the end of the original movie, the Overlook is live and well and evil. King had to admit that more people would be aware of the film than his miniseries, so some of Kubrick’s ideas like the Overlook made it to Doctor Sleep as well. I bet Stephen grumbled about that a bit.

Steven Spielberg made some great changes when he adapted Ernest Clines’s book, Ready Player One, to the big screen. The VR car race through a recreation of New York City is probably way more exciting than watching a guy and a knight in armor playing Joust on an arcade machine. Also, with no disrespect to 1983’s film War Games, having the players navigate a game level designed inside The Shining was amazing! Daphne and I went to see this movie in the theater, and when we got that part I exclaimed, “They’re going into The Overlook!” The people around us just nodded and smiled in agreement. No one scowled at my small outburst.

Halloween '26: Group Photo # 13

    Today's song, "Graveyard Tramp", comes from the Bad Checks' 1985 album of the same name. I bought this LP blind last year at a record show. Turns out this punkabilly/garage rock band from Durham, NC toured with The Replacements. Color me impressed. 

    1971's The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave is an Italian giallo. In Wesley Stenzel’s article, "The 50 best thriller movies of all time, ranked," he describes a giallo as, "... a suspense subgenre that usually blends elements of slashers, murder mysteries, and psychological horror, resulting in dark, pulpy thrillers that are often more explicit than comparable American films from the same era." Well said.

   The DVD for 2006's The Gravedancers (filmed in the Bad Checks' stomping ground of North Carolina) features a fun commentary with Director Mike Mendez and his buddy Composer Joseph Bishara where they play a drinking game every time they see a lit lamp in the film.

Halloween '26: Group Photo #12

    Okay, I'll admit it. Of all the "of the ...Dead" items on this shelf, I'm most proud that I kept the packaging for The Pinball of the Dead for the Game Boy Advance (2002).

    What a great title.

Halloween '26: Group Photo #11

    From left to right: 

  Silent Hill on PS1, Silent Hill DVD,  Silent Hill 2 on PS2, Resident Evil DVD, Resident Evil 2 on PS1

    Clicking on the game's title takes you to the Video Game Critic's review. I do believe all of these games came from Goodwill after the launch of XBox 360 on November 22, 2005. Too bad they're all "Greatest Hits" editions, but you get what you get when you thrift.

   You can still find PS2 and Xbox 360 games at thrift stores. I think the employees often mistake them for DVDs, and they are marked as such on the price tag. Check the media shelf.

    Despite the competition and the auction sites, don't give up on thrift if you want to try it. You can still get lucky. I found this last week:

    The LP is in decent shape. It isn't warped, and you can only hear the light surface noise between the tracks. Fun stuff is still out there. 

Halloween '26: Group Photo #9

  Tonight, from 5-8pm, is the Homecoming Street Party at Urbandale High School. There will be games, inflatables, a duck pond, a DJ, and several food trucks in school’s parking lot. The parade starts at 6pm, and Char will be marching with the band along with the floats and the flags. Should be fun for everyone.

Unless the clowns show up...

Halloween '26: Group Photo #8

     Today there are quite a few parties on the Holiday Horror Shelf. Let's check 'em out.

When Glenn Erickson (The DVD Savant) reviewed the Monsters Crash the Pajama Party: Spook Show Spectacular DVD he wrote, "This eclectic bag of oddities is a Halloween-themed grouping of scores of strange bits of film... everything with a ghost or haunted house or spook show pedigree ... plus two feature films thrown in for good measure!” Basically, this whole DVD from 2001 is an Easter egg hunt. The main menu is just a long haunted landscape that you have to explore with your remote.

    The filmmakers of 2007’s Murder Party, according to the trivia section on IMDB, couldn’t find investors, so the actors also had to be the crew, and they had to pay for everything themselves. Writer/director Jeremy Saulnier went on to write and direct Green Room in 2015 starring Anton Yelchin and a very evil Patrick Stewart. 

The DVD gets bonus points for including instructions on how to make a cardboard knight costume and a loaf of pumpkin bread. 

2000’s Psycho Beach Party is a 50’s psychodrama, a 60’s beach movie, and a 70s slasher film all rolled into one. The movie is based on an off-Broadway play with the same title.

!986’s Killer Party starts off as a horror movie. Then it becomes a horror movie within a movie. Then it becomes a horror movie within a heavy metal music video. Then it becomes a horror movie within a music video within a horror movie…. all in within the first nine minutes. Like Psycho Beach Party, this isn’t a film that takes itself too seriously. Also like Psycho Beach Party, it’s quite a mix. The case’s description says, “Killer Party is the stuff of legends, a one-of-a-kind slasher-horror-musical-sex-comedy of terrors!"

Agatha Christie’s Hallowe’en Party is a 1969 detective novel featuring Hercule Poirot. The 2023 film, A Haunting in Venice, is loosely based on the book. For years the librarians at UHS decorated for Halloween with the same  old “spooky books.” It became a bit of a tradition for me to walk into their space and see Hallowe’en Party beaming from a display shelf during the first week of October. When we hired a new media specialist, she cleaned house and put all the old decoration books out for recycling. Luckily, I was able to rescue Hallowe’en Party from that fate. Now she beams from a shelf in our home. 

Today’s music choice is a slice of new wave pop from 1985. I’m going with the title track from Oingo Boingo’s "Dead Man’s Party." 

Halloween '26: Group Photo #6

     Since yesterday’s Pet Sematary is the real deal in terms of serving up the chills, let’s go the other way today. 

    None of these mummies are scary. I’d argue that 1959’s The Mummy is actually boring. Brendan’s Fraser’s Mummy films are fun PG-13 action adventures. The same can be said about Tom Cruise’s film, but I don't know about the fun. My favorite mummies are in the funk band Here Comes the Mummies. 

    The only thing scary about these mummies is if they came to your town, and you missed their show.

Halloween '26: Group Photo #5

    Pet Sematary is the scariest book I have ever read. Full stop. I was in high school when I finished it very late at night, and I was terrified at the thought that Gage was lurking underneath my bed.

    It doesn't get more Halloween than that. 

    The Pet Sematary movies are fine. I like the original the most. I think I'll watch the remake tonight in the basement while Daphne and her sister watch something British upstairs. It's their weekly ritual. 

    Bloodlines is a prequel. Bloodlines was part of a used, two-pack DVD set, and I wanted a newer version of the original DVD (the new one has a commentary), so now I own Bloodlines, too.

    I found the Ramones Maxi-Single locally, which was fun. The vinyl soundtrack arrived via Discogs.

    I bought this worn, book club edition of Pet Sematary for a buck last spring. I like how its real wear and tear matches the faux deterioration on the DVD's artwork.

    

    FYI: It's hard to type "Sematary" with autocorrect messing it up all the time. 

Halloween '26: Group Photo #4

    I’m sticking with the architectural theme from yesterday’s post. So, let's see what's on the Holiday Horror shelf!

    The year is 1959, you are a teenager, and you’ve come with a few friends to see the new Vincent Price movie, House on Haunted Hill. The lights have been dimmed for the opening reels, and now the theater is completely dark for the main feature. The screen is absolutely black. Silently, in white letters, this appears in the bottom left corner:

Allied Artists

Picture Corporation

Presents

    Then the screen fades to black again and you expect the film’s title to appear. But it doesn’t. For eight seconds the theater is silent and pitch black. Then, through the huge theatrical sound system, you are startled by a woman’s ear-piercing scream! It’s followed by moans, another scream, maniacal laughter, creaking doors, chains rattling, and heavy footsteps. And all of this without a speck of light to be seen. 

    Then, after 30 seconds of this booming, horror soundscape, the disembodied head of Elisha Cook comes flying at you from the foreground to warn that, “The ghosts are moving tonight. Restless. Hungry…”

    It might seem tame today, but in 1959 that was a pretty effective way to scare the crap out of an audience. 

    That opening was so popular that the movie's "audio jump scare" started the “spooky sound effect records” craze. You can still buy similar sound effect/ Halloween music CDs today.

    40 years later, the remake of House on Haunted Hill did an admirable job of opening their film with a gut punch, too. That and the first scene with Geoffrey Rush and Lisa Loeb (!) in an elevator set the tone for the movie: This is going to be a wild and dark ride, and you can’t trust everything that you see. I also like Chris Kattan’s unhinged performance. I believe he was encouraged to go off script. 

    For me, the colorized version of the original is meh. I prefer the film in black and white. I bought this DVD for MST3K's Mike Nelson's commentary and for his signature.

    Return to House on Haunted Hill is a direct-to-video release from 2007. According to IMDB trivia, "The film was designed for use with the Navigational Cinema technology which allows the viewer to choose between two ways the story can go at certain times within the film, ultimately featuring 96 different story possibilities. The feature is only present on the Blu-ray Disc version of the film." It's too bad I only found the DVD at Goodwill. I'll keep looking.

    Waxwork Records released the soundtrack to House on Haunted Hill in 2024. It’s a combination of dialogue, score, and movie effects. The art work is really cool. At least I think it is. I haven’t broke the seal on this one, yet. 

Halloween '26: Group Photo #2

     I like how Google’s AI describes the plot of Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond (1981),"The narrative shuns traditional linear logic, opting instead for a fever-dream sequence of graphic, nightmarish set pieces (including acid attacks, blind spectral figures, and a famous, brutal tarantula attack).”

    Fulci was nicknamed the Godfather of Gore, and this movie was retitled 7 Doors of Death, given a new soundtrack, and was cut by about five minutes in order to get this Italian film into the American market with an "R" rating.

    From left to right: 

    Grindhouse Releasing’s uncut version of The Beyond on Blu-ray with the original soundtrack on CD.

    Also from Grindhouse, this is the alternate soundtrack for 7 Doors of Death on a blood-red LP. 

    I bought 7 Doors of Death on DVD in 2000 when it was released by Diamond Entertainment. There was a lot of buzz about this DVD on the internet forums because it was a cheap alternative to the much more expensive releases of The Beyond. There were also rumors that the DVD was actually the uncut version of that movie. 

    It wasn’t.

    I finally got the uncut version of The Beyond on DVD when our local Borders bookstore (remember them?) had a huge sale on their Anchor Bay DVD sets. I got this Beyond tin, but I still regret not picking up the wooden box release of The Wicker Man. 

    Back then I sold my Diamond DVD to Half Price Books. I think they might have given me two bucks for it. I paid about that at Goodwill to get this DVD back. When I first spotted 7 Doors of Death on the shelf, I embarrassed myself by saying out loud, “Hey! I know you!” 

    If I think an image on physical media cover might be a bit much, then I'll cover it up with my "The Frightened Mogwai" trading card. 

    Fun Fact: “Seven Doors Hotel” was the debut single by the Swedish rock band, Europe (remember them? “It’s the final count downnnnnnn”). The song was written by the lead singer, and the lyrics were inspired by The Beyond. The song was a top ten hit in Japan in 1983.