ok lets all shit our pants to something old: pre-2006 horror film thread

That Grefé set was released, what, a couple months ago? I've read more about it recently that piqued my interest (including your post!) but now afaict it's already out of freakin print.

I saw this just before I gave the Arrow Easter sale one last look and added it to my cart on the off chance it would let me. It turned up today so there are copies in the UK at least.

Sad to report that Grefé's Whiskey Mountain is pretty dull, despite a good cast (incl Christopher George, Roberta Collins). It was shot in North Carolina instead of Grefé's usual territory of Florida. Having poor sound does not help.

(rare) Max Schreck taking a break filming 'Nosferatu' (1922) This photo is creepier than any shot in the movie pic.twitter.com/sQ2iCiN1wj

— Hammer Horror Films (@HorrorHammer1) May 1, 2021

dead and buried, 1981 slow motion seaside village horror a la messiah of evil, currently available on shudder, fog in every scene, totally fucking amazing

This has been a crown jewel in Blue Underground's catalog for so long I'm shocked I still haven't seen it. Was featured in the second installment of In Search of Darkness, though, and it looks fantastic.

There's a second installment of In Search of Darkness!? I think I saw most of the first one, and it was iirc 4 1/2 hours long! And was basically just a parade of talking heads going "and then this movie came out, and it was really cool," and then moving on to the next movie.

Totally forgot that I bought Dead and Buried from a Blue Underground sale late last year. I should get on that.

All criticisms of In Search of Darkness are 100% correct and I also 100% don't care.

xpost that was just included on Last Drive-In on Shudder

i've heard the second in search of darkness is an improvement on the first

The selection of films feels more esoteric, fwiw, and there's definitely more of a laser focus on the Italio horror of the early 80s.

Also, a somewhat hilarious meta moment where the doc includes Terror in the Aisles as one of its featured movies.

Dead and Buried is the other great horror film directed by Gary (Death Line) Sherman. It was actually considered a 'video nasty' in the UK on its first VHS release, probably because of the old needle to the eyeball moment.

I've passed it up many times but I might give it a shot soon

Fade To Black looks pretty good, anyone seen it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5BFrJEmbak

i enjoyed it quite a bit

watched the original Nosferatu this afternoon, 99 years old

saw it a couple of years ago, it was a memorable film

pretty influential. the 25 minute Grayling talk about it was also interesting (this was the bfi disk).

my usual concentration span failings seem to be doubled when watching silent films though - without the speech telling me to pay attention i tend to drift away

Rewatched Dead and Buried after many, many years, thanks to this thread. Still holds up imho. I misremembered the film as being quite comic - a la O'Bannon's Return of the Living Dead - but in fact it's not even especially a 'black comedy', just an out and out shocker. You can sort of see why it got caught up in the Video Nasty scare, despite having more production values than most of the VNs - there's a certain dreamy disconnected energy that's not that far removed from Fulci's House by the Cemetery etc - as well as some fairly graphic gore, especially for an American horror movie at this time. The bandaged man who gets his eyeball needled really looks looks terrified - it's a great image of fear. Perhaps the one major downside is that the central sheriff guy isn't very charismatic and seems kind of slow on the uptake even for movies of this type - his wife teaching kids at her school about voodoo while hiding books about witchcraft around the house does provide some laughs, and brings the film closer to Night of the Eagle than Night of the Living Dead. The sequence where the sheriff watches some black and white film he's got developed by the sinister local chemist already feels v v 'found footage horror' - all the paraphernalia of old cameras, film projectors, flash lights seen throughout now becomes a wonderful snapshot of old means of seeing, as well as a fairly unique portent of sinister intent, still, wisely not too literally explained.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6dFW-ZHAs8

The video isn't one of his best but I'm really happy to see somebody with a big audience talking about Lemora, fingers crossed for a bluray
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyFT7usSROU

finally watched Maniac Cop, not the tone I was expecting and bruce campbell kinda phones it in but overall a lot of fun, stoked to watch the sequels

Maniac Cop 2 is maybe better and more fun and features a pretty novel car chase conceit that I've never seen before and I have no idea how the stuntwoman made it through the scene without sustaining severe carpal injuries. Haven't heard much good about the third, though.

I remain very interested in the refn/hyams reboot series

Finally! I've got a czech dvd of this but I'm so happy about this
https://secondrundvd.ecwid.com/#!/Beauty-and-the-Beast-Blu-ray-Special-Edition/p/367281809/category=0

Watched Night of the Eagle aka Burn, Witch, Burn! last night, holy shit did I ever love that. great script, really inventive direction, awesome effects, engaging performances, a killer premise, and an ending that doesn't shit the bed. (also, since it involves witches and voodoo, I kept waiting for overt racism and/or misogyny, but it never really materializes much - I'm sure it helped that this fellow apparently wrote the final draft) the US version, which is under the latter title, adds a wonderful voice-only intro that is already one of my favorite-ever openings to a movie

Just saw that for the first time a few months back. VG+, a much more serious-minded horror flick than most Arkoff productions of that era. As much love as I have for AIP's campy goof-fests, it's a welcome change of pace.

I wld say that Night of the Eagle/Burn With Burn is Baxt's best credit, although City of the Dead has some nice atmos.

Peter Wyngarde gives a 'full' performance in NOTE/BWB but he's pretty effective playing/conveying fear in the face of unseen terror.

he really grew on me over the course of the movie for sure

horror channel uk seems to be working through cronenberg movies. and i must've seen Scanners before, but i hadn't recognised the sample on, i think, Dubstep Allstars Volume 2 until today.

(yeah, DA2, specifically Loefah's Goat Stare

)

https://arrowfilms.com/product-detail/the-snake-girl-and-the-silver-haired-witch-blu-ray/FCD2196
Worth a watch, I have a bootleg of this. Adapted from Umezu's comic, he makes a brief appearance.

shudder just added messiah of evil. if you have not seen messiah of evil, drop everything

Dead and Buried is the other great horror film directed by Gary (Death Line) Sherman. It was actually considered a 'video nasty' in the UK on its first VHS release, probably because of the old needle to the eyeball moment.

― Ward Fowler, Monday, May 17, 2021 6:52 PM (two months ago)

Quite surprised by this. Just watched Dead And Buried and found it a little underwhelming despite good moments. Script seemed a bit cliched and the acting didn't smooth over it. Style of Death Line is just completely different.

I am psyched to see Messiah of Evil at some point but I don't have Shudder so someone needs to put the blu-ray back in print.

Fun fact: it's written and directed by the folks that brought us Howard the Duck! I won't hold that against it, though.

Abel Ferrara watching The Driller Killer, the good stuff. pic.twitter.com/QHVcyuAMhH

— John Frankensteiner (@JFrankensteiner) October 20, 2020

Messiah of Evil is gd fun - in parts it's the most proto-Lynchian film I can think of - but it does have one of the all-time lame endings (they ran out of money before they could shoot a proper finale).

I missed the recent Eureka release of Viy with the bonus limited edition extra film called Sveto Mesto/A Holy Place. Luckily it is on youtube in a probably scratchier but very watchable form.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwYk7h_wJAk
It's one of the most substantially different versions of Viy I've seen (let's forget about the recent one). More sex, ballbusting, an angry cat and the witch seduces women too. Doesn't have the full-on phantasmagoria of the other ones, but takes interesting directions, definitely worthwhile.

that ferrara commentary is hilarious

Yeah, next time I pick up any of his films I'll check for commentary. Kind of great to hear him just laughing at the really nasty bits.

Just got the Daimajin boxed set (the trilogy all came out within 7 or 8 months in 1966!) and reading an essay in the booklet about the cultural impact. A ton of famous writers and directors were going to do reboots. Katsuhiro Otomo scripted a film that was going to feature Steven Seagal and Golden Harvest was going to co-produce one featuring Kevin Costner. There's a very expensive fan film that was well liked but copyright prevents it getting a proper release

Seems that Kim Newman stuffed his recent Anno Dracula books with an extensive list of japanese monsters including Daimajin and even Kato from Teito Monogatari (the character that M Bison/Vega from Street Fighter was based on)

Daimajin and (at last) Criterion Godzilla set on their way to me, psyched for big-time kaiju filmfest

fear dot com!!!!!

i watched william malone's 1999 remake of house on haunted hill the other week and i loved it so much i needed to see the other movie he made that people actually watched, and fear dot com is maybe the most visually inventive horror movie of its era. if you like shitty macromedia flash websites that are also evil and full of gnarled gothic industrial designs that keep peeling back to reveal FURTHER gnarled gothic industrial designs and also detective procedurals that make little to no sense and also naked ghosts vomiting up blood, this is your (and my) movie. also forecasted the coming decade of torture porn two years in advance of saw

if you like shitty macromedia flash websites that are also evil and full of gnarled gothic industrial designs that keep peeling back to reveal FURTHER gnarled gothic industrial designs and also detective procedurals that make little to no sense and also naked ghosts vomiting up blood, this is your (and my) movie. if you like shitty macromedia flash websites that are also evil and full of gnarled gothic industrial designs that keep peeling back to reveal FURTHER gnarled gothic industrial designs and also detective procedurals that make little to no sense and also naked ghosts vomiting up blood, this is your (and my) movie. if you like shitty macromedia flash websites that are also evil and full of gnarled gothic industrial designs that keep peeling back to reveal FURTHER gnarled gothic industrial designs and also detective procedurals that make little to no sense and also naked ghosts vomiting up blood, this is your (and my) movie. if you like shitty macromedia flash websites that are also evil and full of gnarled gothic industrial designs that keep peeling back to reveal FURTHER gnarled gothic industrial designs and also detective procedurals that make little to no sense and also naked ghosts vomiting up blood, this is your (and my) movie. if you like shitty macromedia flash websites that are also evil and full of gnarled gothic industrial designs that keep peeling back to reveal FURTHER gnarled gothic industrial designs and also detective procedurals that make little to no sense and also naked ghosts vomiting up blood, this is your (and my) movie. if you like shitty macromedia flash websites that are also evil and full of gnarled gothic industrial designs that keep peeling back to reveal FURTHER gnarled gothic industrial designs and also detective procedurals that make little to no sense and also naked ghosts vomiting up blood, this is your (and my) movie.

this is my favorite sentence ever, thank you Brad :)

Amazing boxed set, I've heard the third film isn't very good but this should be fun. I'm a fan of Great Yokai War despite some notable flaws.
https://arrowfilms.com/product-detail/yokai-monsters-collection-limited-edition/FCD2205

Stuart Gordon's Dagon - This is actually an adaptation of "Shadow Over Innsmouth", I didn't detect anything from "Dagon". I liked this better than Reanimator and From Beyond, aside from some iffy special effects it's pretty good. I'm half convinced the team behind Resident Evil 4 seen this, the resemblance seems quite strong to me. All the Barbara Steele comparisons for Macarena Gomez make sense, she looks like a total goth queen in this, wish I'd seen her in more stuff but she's never stopped working.

I love Dragon, the thickness of Fransisco Rabal's dialect and unsubbed Spanish increases hugely the otherness imo.

Macarena Gómez is great, the last thing I saw her in was Hex Studios' The Black Gloves.