Hello, Nightwalkers!
It’s October again, which means it is time for Spooktober and 31 Days of Halloween. As everyone knows, I just fucking LOVE Halloween.
I’m an October baby, I have Gothic pieces around my house, including my very own ‘Thing’ and yes he moves.. and yes you can bribe him with manicures. Ha!
Horror isn’t something I only watch when the calendar gets to October. I watch, read and listen to horror all year round, October just makes me extra happy about it and it gives me an excuse to lean into something I already love even more than usual.
More horror films, more books, old favourites, things I’ve been meaning to revisit and the occasional strange little discovery.
And yes, I know I’m saying this while living in Australia, where October doesn’t exactly look like the Halloween season you see in American films.
Before I get into this month’s news, as always a little housekeeping!
To kick things off for Spooktober, I have updated the DLA Screenings and Old time radio show for the occasion. Hit the media tab and get ready to immerse yourself in some proper “old skool” classics!
With that out of the way… let’s move forward shall we?
Over the years, my Spooktober posts have involved quite a bit of work, especially on the social media side of things. The idea was never simply to make a list of 31 films I wanted to watch. I was curating films for you. Some were films I already knew and loved; others were films I thought you might not have seen. I’d write about them, break them down and hopefully give you something new to discover.
Sometimes I’d do double features. Sometimes one film would send me off on a completely different tangent. I might start with a film and end up writing about a director, an actor, a particular period of horror, another film or something completely unrelated.
Some of those tangents eventually became articles of their own.
And I loved doing that.
There was something really enjoyable about sharing those discoveries with you and seeing where a film might lead.
This year, though, I don’t have the capacity to do the daily breakdowns and all the writing that came with them. So I’m doing something a little different this year, I’m sharing some of the films I return to all the time.
Not because they’re necessarily the greatest horror films ever made.
Not because they make some definitive list.
Simply because I love them.
This year, I just want to share that love, and before anyone asks: no, this isn’t a list of my 31 favourite horror films.
Why I don’t really do favourite lists
I’ve watched a lot of films.
A lot.
Over the course of my life, I’ve probably watched somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 films. I couldn’t give you an exact number, and I’m not sure there would be much point in trying to work it out.
There are two films I can genuinely call definitive favourites:
Metropolis.
Citizen Kane.
Beyond those, things get much more complicated.
It’s not that I can’t tell you about films I love. Obviously I can. The problem is taking thousands of films watched across decades and completely different periods of my life and reducing them to a definitive ranking.
How do you decide which film belongs at number four?
Or number twenty?
And what does that actually tell you?
Film is subjective.
A technically brilliant film can mean very little to one person, while another film that somebody else dismisses can become something you return to for years. Sometimes it’s nostalgia. Sometimes it’s a performance, the music, the atmosphere or a particular memory attached to the film.
Sometimes you just simply really like the bloody thing.
That’s why I’ve never been particularly interested in trying to rank everything I’ve watched.
The 31 films I’ve chosen for this year’s Spooktober aren’t supposed to be the 31 best horror films I’ve ever seen, either.
They’re just films I love coming back to… for whatever reason.
The numbers are there because there are 31 days in October.
That’s it.
31 Days of Horror
- Aliens (1986)
- Suspiria (1977)
- The Return of the Living Dead (1985)
- The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
- Hellraiser (1987)
- Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988)
- Re-Animator (1985)
- House of 1000 Corpses (2003)
- The Howling (1981)
- Fright Night (1985)
- Fright Night Part 2 (1988)
- The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
- Tourist Trap (1979)
- Nosferatu (1922)
- The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959)
- An American Werewolf in London (1981)
- Psycho (1960)
- The Omen (1976)
- The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920)
- The Evil Dead (1981)
- Carrie (1976)
- Halloween (1978)
- When a Stranger Calls (1979)
- The Fly (1986)
- The Exorcist (1973)
- Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)
- Abbott and Costello Meet Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1953)
- Village of the Damned (1960)
- 30 Days of Night (2007)
- Friday the 13th (1980)
- Blood Diner (1987)
There isn’t really a pattern here and there doesn’t need to be one.
Silent cinema sits alongside Italian horror. Universal-style comedy horror sits alongside exploitation. Slashers sit alongside supernatural films. That’s probably a more accurate representation of how I watch horror anyway. I don’t need to keep everything in neat categories.
I can watch Nosferatu one night and Blood Diner the next.
Because…
Why the heck not?
And yes, I know Vincent Price is missing
If you know me, you were probably expecting to see Vincent Price somewhere in that list. Every year, I usually include at least one Vincent Price film in my Spooktober selections.
This year, I deliberately didn’t.
And no, it isn’t because I’ve suddenly stopped watching him. Quite the opposite. Vincent Price appeared in more than 100 films during a career that spanned more than five decades.
I have several Vincent Price films that I return to constantly. They are films I’ve watched over and over again for years, and I know there are always more waiting for me to revisit.
I adore the man. I’ve written about him with a lot of love, and, just to give you some idea of how seriously I take that statement, I actually have a Vincent Price tattoo.
So trying to represent my love for Vincent Price with one film squeezed into a list of 31 just started to feel a little performative.
It didn’t feel right anymore.
Vincent Price deserves his own list.
So this year, I’m leaving him out.
Instead, I’m going to say something much simpler:
Do yourself a favour and watch Vincent Price.
Watch as many of his films as you can find.
Watch the famous ones. Watch the strange ones. Watch the films you’ve never heard of. Watch the ones that aren’t even horror.
Just watch Vincent Price.
The man deserves more than one bloody slot on my Halloween list.
The Books
I’ve also chosen a few books from my own collection for October.
These aren’t a definitive reading list either. They’re simply books I own and enjoy, and they cover some very different parts of horror history and culture.
Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction — Grady Hendrix
Grady Hendrix looks at the horror paperback boom of the 1970s and 1980s, covering the books, publishers, authors and artists that helped make that period so distinctive.
It is also packed with reproductions of the original paperback covers, which makes it as much a visual record as a history of the books themselves.
Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror — Jason Zinoman
Jason Zinoman looks at the development of modern American horror and the filmmakers who helped change the genre, particularly during the late 1960s and 1970s.
It looks at the films and people involved in that transformation, drawing on interviews and stories from filmmakers.
It’s very different from Paperbacks from Hell, but both books are interested in how horror developed and changed.
The Lovecraft Lexicon: A Reader’s Guide to Persons, Places and Things in the Tales of H.P. Lovecraft — Anthony Pearsall
This is a reference guide to the people, places and things that appear throughout H.P. Lovecraft’s stories.
If you’ve spent any time with Lovecraft, you’ll know there are plenty of names, locations and references to keep track of.
It’s the sort of book you can dip into whenever you want to look something up.
An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia — S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz
This is the more substantial Lovecraft reference book.
It covers Lovecraft’s life and literary work and includes a chronology, bibliography and detailed entries relating to his fiction and other writing.
It’s considerably more extensive than The Lovecraft Lexicon and is the sort of reference book that can sit on the shelf until you suddenly need it.
Grindhouse: The Sleaze-Filled Saga of an Exploitation Double Feature — Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez
This is the companion book to the 2007 Grindhouse project.
It goes behind the scenes of the making of Planet Terror and Death Proof, along with the fake trailers created for the project.
It contains interviews, production material, conceptual artwork, scripts and hundreds of photographs and illustrations.
The behind-the-scenes material is a big part of the appeal, and there’s a lot to look through.
Halloween cartoons
And because Halloween doesn’t always have to mean horror films, I’ve also included a few animated shorts:
- The Legend of Sleepy Hollow / Ichabod Crane (1941)
- Trick or Treat — Donald Duck (1952)
- The Skeleton Dance (1929)
- Vincent — Tim Burton (1982)
And that’s where I’m leaving you for this year’s Spooktober.
Happy Halloween Nightwalkers, you fiendish Ghoulssssss!
S.
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