The Halloween List: Prom Night

Previously: Upgrade and Short Night of Glass Dolls

I put off watching Prom Night for years because it was lumped in with those misogynistic punishment Slashers. How good could it really be if the prom scene in Carrie is more famous than this entire movie dedicated to proms? I imagined Jamie Lee Curtis would lead a cast of girls getting massacred for flirting. But that’s not what happens here.

The premise is standard issue: a masked killer stalks a high school on Prom Night. Even in 1980, this wasn’t breaking a lot of ground. The funny thing about Slasher films is they weren’t originally Conservative punishment fantasies. Prom Night is about a small group of friends who, when they were very young, accidentally killed a classmate and ran to hide from the consequences. Someone witnessed the death but never spoke about it. He’s only returned on the eponymous night of their prom for revenge. The killer is attempting to punish these teens for the thing they buried in their pasts.

The Halloween List: Short Night of Glass Dolls (1971) and Upgrade (2018)

Previously: Tragedy Girls, Evil Eye, and What Have You Done to Solange?

Today I offer you two movies, separated by nearly fifty years, with two very different approaches to paralysis. One is a suspenseful Giallo about being mistaken for a cadaver. The other is an action movie that would love to forget disability even exists.

Short Night of Glass Dolls (1971)

Gregory Moore isn’t dead, but the morticians don’t know that. His body is discovered in a garden one morning in Prague by a gardener who only cares about not getting blamed for a homicide. Moore is actually totally paralyzed, unable to speak or so much as blink or move an eye. He’s mistaken for an unusually warm dead body, and morticians study him trying to figure out what’s wrong with the cadaver. If they don’t figure it out, he could be buried alive, or accidentally killed on an autopsy table.

He struggles to think of how to alert someone for help, and tries to comb his memories for what caused all of this. Because of his condition, he can’t act on the immediate conflict. The movie punts, using his memories to flashback and tell the story of what happened before this morning. Moore had a girlfriend who abruptly disappeared, and with police refusing to help, he infiltrated the seedier parts of Prague’s society for answers. It brought him into the proximity of some grim murders, although he didn’t notice them at first and didn’t realize what peril he was in.

Horror's History with Violence Against Women, feat. Tragedy Girls, Evil Eye, & What Have You Done to Solange?

Previously: The Lobster and The Killing of the Sacred Deer

Every October I devote at least one blog post to Giallo films, but I have to deviate this year.

Giallo is a fascinating genre, and I owe Ryan Boyd for helping me jump into it. These are Horror movies about people who are guilty of something, or who got too close to the orbit of crime to wash the dirt off of them. Giallo lets its protagonists be wrong in ways no other sub-genre of Horror does.

But they are also sleazy, eager to sexualize young women and assault them in ways that can be even more off-putting than American Slashers. Some of the most lauded Giallo have problematic art to how they like to destroy girls. This month, after a year of #MeToo and yet another suspect of sexual violence being voted onto the U.S. Supreme Court, I have to interrupt the Giallo vibes a bit. Horror has too few ladies who get to be the killer and be proud in the way it lets Freddy, Jigsaw, and Pennywise.

So today we're going to look at two Giallo films and how they treat women - but only after we look at The Tragedy Girls, a Horror Comedy about a pair of BFFs who are tired of waiting around to be filler victims. These girls are going to become the killers, and get famous off of it.

Tragedy Girls (2017)

Tragedy Girls doesn't care that the bar for women in modern Horror is to be strong heroines who fight against cruelty. It happily picks two teen girls, who are petty and sometimes hilariously short-sighted, and makes them both the lead characters and the killers. The opening of the movie is one of them pretending to neck with a local boy in the efforts to fish out a serial killer.

Oh, they don't want to stop they killer. They want to catch him and study under him. This business is hard and they want professional advice.

The Halloween List for 2018

Happy October, everyone! This is my favorite month of the year. The leaves are turning, the air is fresh, and pop culture is overrun by spooky things. Today I'm hanging a ghost named Gus on my front door, and revealing this year's Halloween List.

The Halloween List is my annual blogathon reviewing scary movies. The rule is that every movie has to be a first-time viewing for me. I spend most of the year saving these films up. Each year is packed with interesting scary movies between Hollywood, domestic indies, and international film, but I'll also try to cover some things from Horror's past, like Kwaidan and the original Haunting. It all kicks off on Wednesday with some titles you probably recognize.

Wednesday, October 3: A Quiet Place & Emelie & Hereditary

Friday, October 5: Mandy & Slice & Summer of '84

Monday, October 8: The Meg & Pyewacket & Hold the Dark

Wednesday the 10th: Thelma & Annihilation & The Endless

Friday the 12th: A break from movies for two special miniseries: Ghoul & Erased

Monday the 15th: Unfriended: Dark Web & Office & Calibre

Wednesday the 17th: The Lobster & The Killing of the Sacred Deer

Friday the 19th: The Evil Eye & What Have You Done to Solange? & Tragedy Girls

Monday the 22nd: Upgrade & Suicide Club & Short Night of Glass Dolls

Tuesday the 23d: Blumhouse's brand new Halloween (2018)

Wednesday the 24th: Prom Night

Thursday the 25th: My Friend Dahmer & Suicide Club

Friday the 26th:  Kwaidan & The Haunting

Monday the 29th: Veronica & Veronica, the strange case of two movies from the same year with the same title and nothing in common.

October 31st, Halloween itself: The Mummy (1932), The Mummy (1959), The Mummy (1999), and The Mummy (2017). A special four-part feature on all four iterations of the classic Mummy franchise.

What looks good to you? What are you watching this October?

Click here for Day One, with A Quiet Place, Emelie, and Hereditary!

The Halloween List: The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, Bay of Blood, and Blood and Black Lace

The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (1970)

These movies have been my first exposure to Italian Giallo, a sub-genre that feels like an evolutionary link between Murder Mysteries and Slasher Films. The Bird With The Crystal Plumage follows Sam Dalmas, an American writer living abroad in Italy, who one night stumbles across an attempted murder inside a museum. Although he’s trapped in the antechamber, he manages to call the police, and then has to wait, just feet away from a woman he can’t help further.

Shockingly, the victim survives passing out from her injuries. More shockingly: she isn’t the only assault victim to live through the movie. The Bird With The Crystal Plumage doesn’t view death like a contemporary film. People survive reasonable injuries, and people like the writer are haunted by what they see. Death isn’t easy to achieve, and it’s also too weighty to shrug off. Sam can’t forget the horrible imagery, and spends the rest of his time in Italy trying to track down the attacker where the police have failed.