Horror goes back-to-back -- or does it?

If there is anything stranger than a horror movie taking my #1 spot in 2023, it's a second horror movie taking my #1 spot in 2024 -- when no movie with that genre tag had ever accomplished that feat before.

But is The Substance really a horror movie?

Skinamarink was/is, there's no doubt about that. But is it possible for a movie that's discussed by almost everyone as body horror, to not actually be part of the larger genre assignment in which body horror is presumably a subset? 

I think it's not only possible, but probable. 

Now, we know that at least for the purposes of Golden Globes consideration, The Substance was considered a comedy. I've always thought it was useful that the Globes breaks down its nominees between drama and musical/comedy, since it broadens the number of types of film on which they can shine the light of praise, beyond the five films that might fit into a single category. The Substance almost certainly would not have been recognised if there were only one category.

We can be snooty and cast serious doubt on whether we should grant the Globes any legitimacy whatsoever, but they do provide a useful role in helping us understand how we should think about a movie like The Substance. Although it is not "ha ha" funny in more than a few individual moments -- I think of that great moment where the already gnarled version of Elizabeth Sparkle storms out of her apartment and tells her neighbor to fuck off -- there is no doubt Coralie Fargeat's film is wicked in its intentions, and is a full-on satire even if it not a full-on comedy.

That does leave space for horror, and believe me, IMDB does assign that category to it. In fact, The Substance has a ridiculous number of categories assigned to it, four of which include the word "horror." In order of how they're listed, these are:

Body Horror
Dark Comedy
Monster Horror
Psychological Horror
Drama
Horror 
Sci-Fi

We can't necessarily trust whoever assigns the categories in IMDB, but the number of genre assignments alone -- more than I have seen for any other film -- probably indicates why this movie was such a fabulous success for me. After all, I've gone on the record saying I wanted my #1 movie to push the limits of an easy genre association, and The Substance passes that test with flying colors.

And despite the mention of horror four times in those categories, I still wonder if it is actually a horror movie.

Let's consider what makes a movie a horror movie. I'll start with the most obvious two:

1) It attempts to scare you by establishing a sense of dread, a sense of not knowing what might happen but knowing it will be bad.

2) It attempts to then spring that scary thing on you with a suddenness that makes you jump, which is why we call it a jump scare. 

These primary two building blocks of a horror more are, I would argue, not even present in The Substance.

Although Fargeat's film establishes a sense of eeriness, supported primarily through the facelessness of the company that provides Elizabeth the drug, nothing about what happens to Elizabeth Sparkle is supposed to be establishing a sense of dread. We might be discomfited by the grossness of it, but there are no things we can't see, hiding in the shadows, that might make the scenario more frightening. In fact, we are directly confronted with the things that happen to Elizabeth in so open a way that it is almost a case of over-sharing, while horror fundamentally relies on under-sharing.

Since there is nothing hiding in the shadows, there is nothing to jump out of those shadows. Therefore, no jump scares either.

Of course, to limit horror to those two basic components is to be rather reductive. I also, however, find it fairly useful in terms of deciding whether something is a horror movie or not. If you can think of any true horror movie that does not contain one or the other of these elements, I'd like to know what it is.

"Body horror," though, is absolutely an appropriate genre classification for The Substance, given how much body horror there is in this movie. Interestingly, this leads us to a distinction between the genre called "body horror" and the use of that phrase to describe something you specifically see within any movie. You can say that a movie contains body horror without actually being part of that genre. As a good example, there is body horror of a sort in the Deadpool movies in that the main character is always having awful things happen to his person. Yet you would not for a moment consider putting that as a genre tag on Deadpool & Wolverine. 

And yet if you were to say that The Substance contained body horror and yet was not part of the body horror genre, well that would be incorrect, now wouldn't it? I think it might have to do with the quantity of body horror. The Substance exceeds that standard by a country mile.

Then the question is, can a movie be in the body horror genre without being in the larger horror genre that surrounds it? 

I don't know if I have an answer to that, but then I can look back on the evidence of The Substance and how little effort it makes to "scare" us in the conventional ways that a standard horror movie scares us. Being a cautionary tale is not the same thing as being scary.

When it comes to the subject of body horror, you should always come back to David Cronenberg. The grandfather of body horror, the genre, includes body horror, the cinematic component, in almost every one of his films. Even A History of Violence has a knack for body horror -- remember seeing the close-up of that guy's face after Viggo Mortensen stomps it? 

Cronenberg's movie Existenz seems like a good example. Although I don't remember a lot of this movie, it is one of the first movies I think of when I think of the concept of body horror in the abstract. My memory of this film, though, is that it uses body horror more for the purposes of science fiction -- like The Matrix did -- than for anything that would truly be categorized as horror. And that provides a good template for what The Substance is, though in this case that primary genre might be satire.

Or it might be science fiction. Or it might be drama. Or it might be dark comedy. These are all possible genre associations for The Substance.

All these questions are to the good of Fargeat's movie. When trying to pick apart why a movie is my #1, our very inability to pigeonhole it is a strong asset in its favor. 

The only thing I know for sure -- and the only thing that really matters -- is that a really awesome movie has gone back-to-back with another really awesome movie.

I can't wait to see what awesome movie succeeds it in 2025. 

Intentionally funny, not bad enough to be funny, intentionally terrifying

As we are winding down to Halloween, I'm hitting the last part of my horror comedy schedule, having now watched more than a dozen movies this month that were either straight-up horror comedies or could be considered a horror comedy if you squinted.

This three-movie weekend horror recap includes one horror comedy that lived up to expectations, one that was pitched as a comedy but didn't work in that regard, and one, just for good measure, that isn't a horror comedy, but scared the shit out of me four months ago when I first watched it, so I thought I would show it to my wife.

You only get posters for the first two, because I've already written about the third movie and three movie posters is just too much.

My Friday night double feature was made possible by two movies under 90 minutes long. Unfortunately, I did get tired enough by the end that I had to watch the last ten minutes of the second one after 2 a.m.

Bride of Chucky was one of the unseen horror comedies I might have been able to produce before this series started without the benefit of consulting any lists. The Next Picture Show podcast mentioned it in relationship to M3GAN when they talked about that movie earlier this year, though I only listened to the podcast relatively recently since it took me until April to see M3GAN. I knew that this was considered to be the film where the Child's Play series took a definitive, intentional turn towards comedy -- so I didn't worry so much that I'd be seeing these movies out of sequence, which I usually considered a no-no. I saw the original movie back at the time -- and didn't like it very much, if my subsequent Letterboxd star ratings and placing on Flickchart are an accurate reflection of my feelings -- but didn't see Child's Play 2 or Child's Play 3, the third coming out a mere eight months after the second in 1991. 

The now poorly received series then went into hibernation for seven years, surely convincing most people they had stopped after a trilogy now that the limited initial love for these movies had dissipated. But someone -- writer Don Mancini, director Ronny Yu -- decided it was time to inject a little life into the series and into that doll that was inhabited by the soul of a serial killer, and they came back with what I can only imagine is the best Chucky movie anyone will ever make. (Though I did quite like the 2019 reboot.)

There isn't a moment of doubt that Bride of Chucky is both self-aware and in on the joke. The evidence locker where this murderous doll has been lying in pieces (presumably his fate at the end of Child's Play 3) also contains Jason Voorhees' hockey mask, Michael Meyers' Shatner mask and Freddy Krueger's knife fingers. The release of Scream two years earlier was probably the dividing line that allowed Mancini and Yu to go there, though there's no Ghostface mask -- too recent.

Jennifer Tilly comes in soon after and vamps gloriously, not because she's overdoing it but because a certain vamping quality is built into her performance style. We learn her character, Tiffany, was the girlfriend of Charles Lee Ray at the time he was killed and sucked into the body of the doll, so she's the one who engineers the theft of the doll from the evidence locker so she can extract his soul back into a body. However, she gets mad at the revived doll when she learns Ray never actually planned to propose to her back at that time, and laughs at the mere suggestion. (The ring she thought was an engagement ring was actually booty from a robbery.) So she locks him in a cage and buys a lookalike female doll in a bridal gown, mostly to taunt him as she figures out how she's going to continue to make his life hell. It actually goes the other way around when a bathtub electrocution consigns her soul to the new doll.

Having not seen enough previous or subsequent Child's Play movies to fully have a basis for comparison, I suspect the main way this registers as a comedy is the dialogue and line deliveries given these two characters, and the way they bicker. In order to preserve what's scary about a doll like the original Chucky, you can't give him too much dialogue, and the dialogue you do give him has to be consistently menacing. By giving these two characters a lot of time on screen just by themselves, you have to delve into purposefully banal exchanges that are just funny because of the disconnect between what they're saying and their little murderous doll faces. Effectively one of these two characters is, or both are, the protagonist of this film, whereas the other films would have been told from the perspective of a human.

Oh there are humans here, too -- Katherine Heigl, surprisingly, and John Ritter, plus some other actors who were new to me. (Though Ritter doesn't last too long and his death involves another humorous allusion to a stalwart horror franchise.) But we are interested most in the doll dynamics and they are consistently played for maximum possible laughs -- though not dumb laughs. (There's a scene where Chucky is using a Speak and Spell in his cage and has to spell "woman." He spells it "B-I-T-C-H," and the Speak and Spell corrects him on the spelling. This is actually a smart undermining of and poking fun at his toxic masculinity, since both Tiffany and the Speak and Spell are thwarting him.) 

In fact, I was surprised at how much intelligence went into making this movie. Yu came out of Hong Kong cinema and has some credibility as a filmmaker, which shows up here on multiple occasions. Can you believe there would be split diopter shot in Bride of Chucky? That's where a split lens is used to allow both the foreground and the background to be in focus simultaneously. Overall I was just surprised at how good this movie looked, especially since I thought Idle Hands (shot a year later) looked so crappy. It turns out it wasn't just that movies made in the late 1990s looked bad. 

I could go on about the joys of Bride of Chucky, but I have two other movies to get to.

It may have been too much to expect a movie made in 1982 also to be self-aware as a horror movie and exist in the realm of comedy, but I was led to believe The Slumber Party Massacre might be that movie. It made it onto at least one of the lists I consulted, and it was a title I was aware of just because of its B-movie pulpiness. 

As I began watching, though, I quickly concluded that if it was included on lists of horror comedies, that was because someone found its technique worth of ridicule. Alas, The Slumber Party Massacre had to be a lot worse than it was to fall into the category of "so bad it's good."

This is a classic example of the horror movie's sale of female flesh to its prospective audiences. That poster is a rather brazen admission of that agenda. At a slumber party, of course teenage girls get semi-naked (or fully naked) and have pillow fights, right?

In fact, the gratuitous nudity in some of the earlier scenes that take place in a high school locker room shower are exactly the types of things no filmmaker could get away with today. The camera goes up and down the naked bodies of the showering girls, with no other purpose than to reveal their flesh to the audiences. Imagine my surprise that the film was directed by a woman, Amy Jones -- likely with explicit instructions from a lot of men who knew what this movie had to contain for audiences to buy tickets.

The killer is an escaped convict who gets his hands on a drill. I did find there to be something sort of funny about how the film doesn't do anything to shroud his identity in the sort of mystery that is necessary to add extra menace to his character. No, when we see him, it's just some ordinary, perhaps slightly mean-looking guy without a mask or anything other means of preventing people from seeing his face and identifying him in a police lineup later on. (The mask has a practical purpose in addition to making the killer more terrifying.)

A number of characters gets sliced up by the drill in ways that are rarely imaginative enough to remember, but never incompetent enough or with poor enough effects to cause laughter. If you were expecting poor acting to push this into the realm of comedy, you'll be disappointed there too, as these are competent enough professional actors. The writing is a bit of a disappointment, too, in that it is perfectly passable. 

I felt like a movie like this would get either a Bride of Chucky-esque four stars on Letterboxd, or one star because it would be so terrible. The two stars I gave it were an indication of it disappointing in either direction and just being a bland, mediocre horror movie rather than a delight -- for either of the possible reasons it could have been a delight.

The last movie I am talking about today is Skinamarink, which I watched back in April and then tried to watch again Saturday night with my wife.

I say "tried" because she didn't last the whole movie. She did last long enough that I thought she would have overcome the initial barrier to entry, which would mean she'd be on board for the whole thing. Alas, she expired after 52 minutes, acknowledging that it was a good movie but that it was more creepy than scary, and that its slow pace meant she'd be asleep after watching ten more minutes -- so that would mean she wouldn't see it anyway.

I applaud her on the effort. She doesn't watch a lot of movies these days, and Skinamarink demands a lot of its viewers. There is almost no plot. We experience a haunting in a house seen almost exclusively from weird, canted angles, lit by sickly lamp light or the light of a television, where it is always night and where the images are captured through the fuzzy and grainy technology of a 1995 camcorder. Only once do you see the face of any of the four characters, only two of whom make any significant appearance. The creepy things that happen -- and there are plenty, eventually -- don't really start to gain in intensity until the second half of the movie, before which you are left entirely to imagine that something might be about to scare the crap out of you, some not-quite-seen thing moving in the grainy black. In fact, my wife was less than five minutes away from something that might have kept her involved until the end, but really, she probably just wanted to get to her own Saturday night viewing, and I can't blame her. She did try, and knowing the type of movie it was, I had given her permission to bail before we even started. I thought making that explicit was the least I could do, given her willingness to trust me on a movie she hadn't heard of and knew nothing about.

The anticipation of horrors to come certainly sustained me, even on a second viewing, as this environment tingled my spine throughout, even though I knew the approximate intervals at which the conventionally scary things would happen. Even those conventionally scary things are minimalist in nature, which I think only makes them more effective than some banal jump scare. The fact that I am getting chills even as a write about Skinamarink is a good indication of the sort of headspace this movie creates. I continue to find it a singular accomplishment in horror. Though now that I've watched it twice in just more than four months, I'll probably wait a couple years before a third viewing ... time enough to forget some of the things I know about it and again find myself in a constant state of anticipation and terror.

It's possible I will watch one more horror comedy on either Sunday or Monday night, but if not, it's certainly been a good theme this month. On Halloween itself, my wife and I plan to watch this year's horror movie Talk to Me, which neither of us has seen -- and which she should watch in its entirety, since it has her full buy-in. 

And then suddenly I did find Dead Alive

I think I have now made three mentions on this blog how I did not expect to be able to get my hands on Peter Jackson's 1992 film Dead Alive during October to watch as part of horror comedy month, given its total absence from streaming services, rental outlets, and even Internet Archive, the free internet library I have recently discovered where you can find all kinds of lost causes. (My first opportunity to rewatch Dominik Moll's Lemming, a favorite from 2005 that I haven't been able to find anywhere since, will soon be courtesy of Internet Archive.)

But as has happened numerous times before, I forgot to check YouTube. And there it was.

I am not sure how strenuously the lawyers are protecting the copyright of things like Dead Alive. But I wonder if its total absence from everywhere else means that it is somehow in the public domain -- though that would make me think I'd find it everywhere rather than nowhere.

In any case, I did finally harpoon my white whale for October, the movie I felt was most likely to fulfill exactly what I'm going for by watching horror comedies this month.

That assumption could not have been more correct.

Before I get into the discussion of the film proper, I do want to discuss its title. As I was watching and the title Dead Alive flashed up on the screen, I felt certain that this was confirmation of its "true" title. Just now when I checked on Wikipedia, I realized that this was never the proper basis for any confirmation, because it depended on whether an American version was uploaded to YouTube or a Kiwi version. In New Zealand (and presumably everywhere else other than North America), this film is called Braindead, so that's undoubtedly how Jackson thinks of it. Logically, I should do the same.

Why am I not? I guess because it is a movie I have been at least distantly aware of since it first came out, when I was still living in America for another 20 years, and when every reference to it would have been as Dead Alive. It's like how I will always list Natalie Portman's film debut as The Professional even though I know it was called Leon in the director's home country of France. To be clear, if an Australian film were released today and given a new name for the U.S. market, I'd certainly go with the Australian name, because I would have encountered that first. I don't think there can be a hard and fast rule on this, so you just have to go with your gut on a case-by-case basis. And part of it is that I just like the title Dead Alive better.

However, to honor Jackson, I will also include a Braindead poster, then will forever afterward use the title Dead Alive.

Dead Alive starts out fairly tamely, although I should acknowledge that a man's hand and arm do get cut off in the opening scene. The more fascinating thing about this opening scene, if we are considering Jackson's entire career, is that it takes place on Skull Island -- you know, the home of King Kong. Given that this was still deep within Jackson's DIY phase, and only his third feature overall, it's hard to imagine his expensive and lavish King Kong remake was only 13 years off -- not to mention that he'd be making his first Lord of the Rings only nine years later (and starting on it well before that). 

The central affliction in Dead Alive is passed by bites, and indeed a crew from New Zealand is bringing back a rare monkey from this island (not the oversized one who is its most famous occupant) to house in a zoo in Wellington. It's an ugly little bastard called a rat monkey. I didn't get this from the movie itself -- maybe I didn't hear it properly as I was still adjusting to the Kiwi accents -- but Wikipedia tells me that this creature was spawned from "the rape of tree monkeys by plague-carrying rats." I have some questions about the biological logistics of this but let's move on.

Anyway, this awful monkey -- the first great practical effects creature we are introduced to -- is given to grabbing and tearing off the appendages of monkeys in neighboring cages, an activity you'd think would be enough to get him isolated a safe distance from all other creatures if not entirely put down. He gets a bite into the arm of the domineering mother of our main character, Lionel (Timothy Balme), a neurotic man whose father was killed in a drowning incident when he was young. Lionel is in love with a Spanish Romani shopkeeper's daughter, Paquita (Diana Penalver), despite the objections of his smother mother.

It isn't long before she gets sick, before flaps of her skin begin peeling off and before she loses an ear into the soup she's eating one day at lunch. No worries, she just catatonically eats it again, spitting out the pearl earring.

What follows is an increasingly hilarious spreading of a zombie plague that includes all sorts of partial and complete decapitations, exposures of rib cages, vomiting up of guts, sprays of green goo, popping of eyeballs, severing of limbs, extracting of teeth with pliers, halvings of bodies, and funniest of all, a scene of a priest karate kicking a half dozen zombies all around a church cemetery. 

This is just an absolute gore-soaked, viscera-laden joy. The labor of love that is evident in every single frame of Dead Alive makes this, understandably, a favorite of horror fans everywhere. Coming 11 years after Sam Raimi's Evil Dead, this movie pays loving homage to the mother of all horror comedies at every turn. (Well, at least Evil Dead II was clearly defined as horror comedy.) I mention this only because I am hard-wired as a critic to make explicit connections between movies when I write my reviews. Dead Alive is its own thing and only owes its zany, raucous spirt to what Raimi and others put in motion. (Raimi, of course, has his own debts to George Romero.) 

I just looked them up, and Raimi is only two years older than Jackson. What a wee little pup Raimi was when he got started. It seems likely that the title Dead Alive was chosen specifically in the U.S. market to remind us of both Romero and Raimi, and if that's the case and it brought more eyeballs to see the eyeballs that pop out of their sockets in Dead Alive, then all the better.

One thing I love about it, that you don't get from those other two franchises, is the Kiwi sense of humor that courses through this movie. Although I think the scenario would be funny as presented in any language or with any cultural origins, there's something about the New Zealand line deliveries and these characters in general that makes it all the more so. Just imagine Taiki Waitit's sense of humor in a full-on zombie movie and you'll get what I'm talking about. (In fact, I reckon What We Do in the Shadows is kind of his own version of this.)

And the gore -- oh the gore! It's delightful. I don't think I'm one to giving audible reactions to the films I'm watching, but I couldn't get through Dead Alive without laughing and making vocal grimaces ("Ugh! Ohhh! My God!") at the places Jackson gleefully goes in this film. 

Lastly I should mention the one fully practical "human" character in the film, which is a zombie baby that was the result of the posthumous sexual relationship of a zombie nurse and a zombie priest. This is pretty much the movie's signature character, so if you see a single image from Dead Alive it's likely to involve this guy:

I think this might be the evil twin of Kuato in Total Recall.

Dead Alive is the kind of movie where if I knew you'd seen the movie, I'd double the length of this post and keep saying "Remember the part where ________? That was awesome." With credit to Chris Farley.

But since I don't know if you've seen it -- and since I know you can find it on YouTube -- maybe I'll leave it to you to make these wonderfully gruesome discoveries yourself. 

I'm afraid it may be all downhill from here in terms of horror comedy, but I've got one more full weekend to try to top Dead Alive before I probably settle in for some more conventional scares leading up to Halloween. 

Not the same Stuff

We have Stuff in our refrigerator right now.

Oh, it's not the same white Cool Whip-looking dessert that starts bubbling out of the earth in the horror comedy I watched on Wednesday night, leading those who discover it to think that they can/should put it on the supermarket shelves for mass consumption. Our Stuff is a little different than that.

Early on in our marriage, when my wife and I started to establish a regular shopping list every time we went to the grocery store, she would often ask for a bubbly water with a hint of lime that she liked to drink with dinner. On one particular occasion, she could not think of what to call it so she said something like, "You know, that stuff I drink."

For whatever reason, the name stuck. Now it is shorthand between us. When she wants this bubbly water, she just says she need some Stuff. 

I don't think we'd capitalize it, but it's not something I ever usually have to write out. In fact, I'm capitalizing it primarily because the horror comedy I watched on Wednesday is called The Stuff. It's from 1985 and was written and directed by Larry Cohen.

Among the movies I've watched so far in October, this is clearly the farthest to the comedy side of the horror-comedy spectrum I'm exploring. One dead giveaway is that it co-stars former Saturday Night Live comic Garrett Morris, though he disappears from the narrative for entirely too long. (In fact, you'd say that they forgot about him except that he does reappear in the final scene.) Another is that it has a number of openly absurd moments, especially involving the military in the climax, that cannot be interpreted as anything other than comedy.

From a filmmaking perspective, though, it's pretty shoddy -- poorly edited, poorly directed, and generally poorly acted, despite the presence of big names like Morris, Michael Moriarty, Danny Aiello and Paul Sorvino.

I should tell you a little more about this Stuff than what I shared in the opening of this piece.

With zero preamble -- literally from 0:00:01 on the clock, the story has started -- we see a couple of old geezers on a work site in the snow. One discovers a white substance bubbling out of the ground, and as you do, he tastes it. The other walks up and thinks he's eating snow, but instead he's eating this weird substance that no one has ever discovered, with no consideration of the fact that it could be toxic. (I think you're seeing the comedy present from the start.) Seeing, I suppose, that the first guy has not toppled over, the second one has a bite and they both immediately start dreaming of millions in their pockets.

Due to some dubious paying off of testers at the Food and Drug Administration, the product is soon flying off the supermarket shelves and filling up the refrigerators of every home in America. (There are a number of time leaps in this movie that are handled very awkwardly in the editing.) Sensing that it is losing a significant portion of the dessert market, Big Ice Cream hires Moriarty's character, Mo Rutherford, a shady former FBI agent who will try to infiltrate The Stuff and figure out what it is made of so they can make a competing project. Of course, no one knows what it is actually made of, only that it is addictive as hell ... and eventually starts having unanticipated consequences for those who consume it.

What are these consequences? Well this is where the horror comedy gets really fun. Not nearly enough times in the story, we see a character's mouth open wide beyond normal human means, as seen in the poster above, and extrude a big oozing avalanche of that marshmellowy foam, often destroying the body on the way out. We first see this with a dog who is fed The Stuff. Why this doesn't seem to happen more often, and only on certain people/animals, is never really explained. Given the success of this product, we'd expect it to affect millions of people, but (spoiler alert) the final death toll is only reported in the thousands.

The slipshod way this film is thrown together is part of the fun. We can tell that everyone is on the joke, but I still think the script and the execution of this material could have been better. (I was going to say "tighter," but the movie is only 87 minutes long, so I guess that's pretty tight.) I had to demerit the film for its poor filmmaking, so I gave it only 2.5 stars on Letterboxd. I did have fun with it though.

And indeed, it was great to see the practical effects used during the film's too-few real horror scenes where the effects of The Stuff on the body are depicted. Between this and last Friday's Society, I'm more than making up for missing out on the practical effects in Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, which I don't expect to be able to find this month.

Two twisted microcosms of society

I'm trying to thematically lump together the last two horror comedies I've watched this month so I don't have to go the unsustainable "one movie/one post" route in writing about them here.

However, I was almost going to write a separate post about how Society, which I watched on Friday night, was my potential practical effects substitute for Peter Jackson's Dead Alive a.k.a. Braindead, which it is looking increasingly unlikely I am going to get my hands on this month. I ended up writing about something else yesterday instead. 

Then on Saturday night I watched a Swedish horror new to Netflix that I had only known about for approximately 24 hours.

Brian Yuzna's 1989 film Society came up on more than one of the lists I looked at for horror comedies, and at the start, I thought the reason it was considered funny is that it's a low budget film made in the late 1980s. Now mind you, most of the technique in terms of acting and writing belies the low budget, but the cinematography itself is not great, and everything looks, for want of a better word, dated. I feel like it might have even looked dated in 1989.

As the film progresses toward a truly nuts climax, though, it became more clear that this is a film that isn't just going to get by on the notions it presents about a possible secret society of people who engage in murderous orgies, but actually show us one of these events ... and all the practical makeup effects it requires.

I don't think you necessarily need to issue spoiler warnings for movies that are 34 years old, but it's possible some of you reading this will be using my words to get ideas for things to watch on your own Halloween viewing schedule. So I won't go into detail about how this movie ends. But I will say that the movie holds back most of its effects until the very end, and they are the kind of thing that Jackson certainly would have adored at that time. (I googled to see if he'd made any public comments about the movie, but I couldn't get the necessary search terms to be sure.)

In terms of the "society" theme, other than its pointed title, the movie does include how the haves and have nots both of their predetermined role in a system that is created by the haves. I won't go into it any further than that.

The Conference is a more straightforward film that might be more like a horror satire than a horror comedy, though the reprehensible nature of some of the characters, and the comeuppance they receive, certainly seems to qualify it as a viewing for this month. (Part of the reason I chose it, also, is that it gives me something to review this week. In a way, being a horror comedy was just a bonus.)

The Swedish film involves a retreat by a group of nine public sector employees on the eve of breaking ground on a new shopping center that they brought to fruition. They're at a remote camp that's equipped with things like zip lines where the team can engage in trust activities and complete competitive group tasks. Their phones are taken away from them so they can unplug. Of course, it's a great -- though not totally unexpected -- setup for a horror movie.

The mask you see in the poster -- which is supposed to be a mascot for the shopping center -- gets worn by an intruder who begins picking them off one by one. The satire, though, comes from the corrupt leadership of this group, who may be setting the project up to fail for the benefit of another company who is going to sweep in and capitalize on the ruins of the project -- in exchange for cushy jobs to the key collaborators. 

A work conference makes for an interesting dynamic for a horror frame story, because unlike an excursion between supposed friends -- which is the setting for most horror movies -- a truly diverse set of personality types may be represented, since these people only came together because they happened to have interviewed for the same job. And of course the way their dynamic echoes the larger dynamic of different people in a society is ripe with satirical potential.

A good time for sure, if perhaps not quite as memorable as it may have had the opportunity to be.